


to love with a rough abandon

by Debate



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bonding, Certain amounts of plot, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Found Family, Gendry Waters-centric, Light Angst, Mild Sexual Content, Red Riding Hood Elements, Self-Discovery, Slow Build, canon adjacent, raised by wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:55:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Debate/pseuds/Debate
Summary: A huntsman threatens to fall in love with a wolf while winter teeters on the brink of spring.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 71
Kudos: 205





	1. Chapter 1

_Be careful of the mother in the dark shroud_

_for she has a cursed name you must not say aloud_

_And be careful of the girl with the stark red hair_

_it was kissed by burning fire, so you best beware_

_But be most careful of the girl with grey eyes_

_for she carves out hearts with both teeth and knives_

* * *

He smelt the blood before he saw it, on a gust of wind that threw off his hood and sent his shoulders shaking.

He fixed his hood first, once the wind had slowed, and squinted ahead, a bit to his left, to try and find where the scent had come from. It was the first thing to disrupt his sniffles in hours. He wished it hadn’t.

The spot of red was fresh, as bright as those tempting plumb berries that no bird would approach. And as dangerous.

A wolf with blood on its maw was already facing him, it had probably heard him a mile off, his big boots crunching snow and breaking twigs like it was a hobby, and Gendry, the fool, had smelt blood and hadn’t even gotten his crossbow out. The wolf stood crouched low to the ground, maybe a hundred paces away, but he knew with a cold, bone deep certainty that it would take all of three bounds for it to sink its teeth into his neck. It was huge, the only beast that wasn’t starving in a hundred miles.

Gendry’s legs locked in fright, and his mind raced, trying to remember if he was supposed to holler, or run, or climb a tree. All his mind could conjure up though were stories traded in his childhood at dusk. Ones about the dangers of the woods where he now lived, about the maneaters that haunted it.

He remained still instead, his heartbeat pumping against his throat the only part of him that was moving; as if it were a beacon of where the wolf should bite down.

A cloud of mist burst from the wolf’s nose, the tang of blood suddenly sharper. Gendry clenched his teeth to stop them from chattering and shattering the stillness he was sure was saving his life.

The wolf breathed one more time and then lowered its head, dropping something from its mouth onto the snow. At the distance he stood it was too small to make out. By all logic he shouldn’t have been able to meet the animal’s eyes at that distance either, but he could. They were a deep yellow. Something about them looked human, beckoning, knowing. He took a step forward with one hand outstretched, the slippery thought that it was all a clever trap unable to deter him. His numb fingertips pressed against the binding of his gloves, almost eager to be bitten.

But the wolf turned away as he shifted closer, its head turned back to look at him for its first few steps, as if assuring him he could he continue in his approach. By the time he reached the place it had stood when he first spotted it, the wolf had disappeared into the more densely forested wood.

Massive pawprints left embedded in the snow were proof enough that Gendry hadn’t imagined the whole encounter, yet the racing of his heart was so fast it felt neat unnatural, like a premonition of his own death. 

The rabbit’s foot was real enough. It was left where the wolf had dropped it, with a bone sticking out slightly, the blood dried. Gendry picked it up with his numb fingers and wondered why a wolf would wish him luck.

…

In another life he had been a blacksmith. One where he hadn’t known winter, just the city life he had hated for creating anonymity and indifference and cruelty. There were still those things in the woods, but with a different flavor, and the lack of means for a smith. In the dark and the cold soldiers didn’t need swords, farmers didn’t need ploughs, and Gendry didn’t need their coins. It was grain and meat they all needed, and somewhere to warm their hands.

His old forge was good enough for that, and with his cot put where his anvil should be, he slept without fear that the cold would grip his limbs and freeze his eyes from waking.

But he did miss the work, the feeling of being good at something, of having his long hours and careful precision be rewarded. Instead he was stuck, a city boy playing at being a huntsman.

He was playing well, at least. He hadn’t starved yet.

But it wasn’t really himself that he was worried about starving. He was grown, maybe not as strong or wide as he had been in summer, but he was far from frail. It was the young ones who really had something to fear from hungry bellies, who didn’t have the skills to feed themselves. So this season he was a huntsman, feeding a collection of orphans living in the inn a mile off the main road. Ones that had him both cursing and relying on his inability to be truly selfish. Something about the orphans’ thin faces, how easily they could be taken, picked at his heart till it bled. He should know better. Winter was not the time to breed sympathy.

Yet it seemed to grow anyway. He took the rabbit’s foot from his pocket. Had the wolf thought it was sympathy? Enough to feed a man? It should have just eaten it. That was what any rational being would have done. 

Gendry found a rag to clean off the dried blood and then sat with a knife, removing the skin with one long cut. He cured it with salt, and stuffed it with straw, before using his clumsy stiches to sew it back together. The project took up the duration of his dinner time, but by the end of it the rabbit’s foot had a short chain running through it. The thing would hang nicely off his beltloop.

It was odd, he used to scoff at superstition and the odd rituals people would perform as some appeasement to one god or another. There was no god he sought to gain favor with, but he would take some luck. He had seen enough from these woods to know not to look a gift wolf in the mouth, for surely it would bite.

…

He went to the inn in the morning, because the innkeeper’s daughter—just the innkeeper now, after her mother’s death—would worry. Her eyes grew darker with each snowfall without the added burden of his absence. 

“Before you ask, I don’t have anything,” he said, walking through the backdoor where he knew Jeyne would be at this hour. It helped that it placed him in the kitchen, where it was warmest. The large fireplace on the right wall was roaring, a black pot sitting above it. Two of the orphans, twins, but you couldn’t tell with Hana being so much taller, were situated on stools next to the fire and teaching the new boy, Pen, how to peel a potato. He did so slowly, afraid of the knife’s edge, even when it was pointed away from him. He watched as Selma carefully collected all the discarded peels and waited for Jeyne’s labored sigh. It didn’t come, instead her eyes simply flickered to the open, and near empty, cupboard.

“Why are you here then?” Jeyne said. Their relationship was based on a mutual silent agreement that they didn’t express care for each other or the children under her roof. It seemed pointless, in the third year of winter, with them both knowing it not to be true. But traditions seemed to be one of the only things they could keep alive, that and the feigned ignorance of the dark looming shawl that hung over them.

“I saw something yesterday,” he said, stepping closer and lowering his voice so the children wouldn’t hear. “A wolf.”

Jeyne’s eyes pressed closed in frustration.

“Enough to worry about with the Lady’s fucking taxes,” she grumbled, both angry and sad. Her grip was white knuckled over the spoon, she gave the soup a vigorous spin. “Tell me how I’m supposed to keep this lot indoors at all times?”

Gendry didn’t give an answer because he knew she didn’t want one. Everyone was pale these days, but in that moment, Jeyne was especially so.

“Wolves run from fire, yeah?” She asked and he nodded in confirmation then. There was a plan being built behind her eyes, but Gendry questioned if she’d have the strength to carry it out if needed.

“Don’t be afraid to ask Willow for help, now,” he suggested. “She’s far from your baby sister.”

Willow was fifteen but had a woman’s mind. She also had a playfulness with the children that far outpaced the frayed nature of Jeyne’s patience.

Jeyne nodded in dismissal. She didn’t take suggestions or criticism well, especially regarding concerns about her sister or her inn. It was frustrating. Sure, he’d hate it too if she came in and told him how to smelt steel, but he’d earned that right after ten years of a master’s criticism. “Just warning you.” He turned to leave. “I’m going out again today,” he said, like he said near every day.

“Kill a buck,” Jeyne responded, tired, like she did near every day. Then, as he was half out the door, “Or a wolf.”

…

It was less bitter today, but only barely, the sky a blue illusion of a summer day. He made out towards the gushing river, its rapids ensuring it was one of the only bodies of water that didn’t freeze completely over. Most of his traps were set up in its vicinity. The critters, as much as him, were sick of drinking snow melt.

But not today, it would seem, the first four of his traps mocked him with their barrenness, the fifth especially so because it had been sprung but was still empty. His gut churned, calling his attention to its emptiness and his mind instantly shifted to that soup Jeyne had been stirring. He hadn’t eaten last night, or this morning, and while Jeyne hadn’t offered him a portion, she wouldn’t have denied him if he had asked. He pressed the heel of his hand to his stomach, and it made a poor substitute.

Perhaps he should return to the glade the wolf had stalked yesterday. It had caught something there, he might have so much luck. Except he had three more traps to check, and the possibility of leaving something uncaptured would haunt him, and his stomach. So, he moved further down the river, the rabbit’s foot bouncing against his thigh with every other step.

A cluster of bushes grew where the riverbank slopped sharply down. The Gendry of three years ago, who hadn’t been enjoying the last leaves of autumn enough, had chosen the spot figuring it would be a place of shelter for small mammals.

Larger ones seemed to find it satisfactory too. For a moment Gendry thought that it was the wolf again, or some other phantom creature of winter. But no, it was a person, bundled in furs, the one across their shoulders the same grey as the wolf’s. Surprise choked Gendry’s voice for a moment; so rarely did he meet a lone stranger in these woods, even if tall tales and ballads talked of them constantly. Tricky and vicious, they always were, impossibly beautiful and devastatingly ugly. He’d even met a few.

This one seemed tricky enough, even without any obvious magics, their fingers were fiddling with the rope of his trap, untangling a small bird, dead of exhaustion. It was a cardinal, feathers as red as the blood on the wolf’s maw.

“Hey!” He called out, no attempt to keep himself quiet. “That’s mine that you’re messing with!”

The figure shifted in their crouch and raised her head. The shape of her face was feminine, even with her mouth and nose covered with a thick woolen scarf in the same manner as his. Only her sharp eyes stood out, grey as the furs on her back, separated by one curl of dark brown hair brushing up against the bridge of her nose. She was utterly disinterested in his complaint. It just rose his frustration.

“My trap!” He said in emphasis, “You shan’t be stealing from it.”

He stood over her now, looking down, but she remained uncowed by the inflection of his voice. She rose to her full height, and was still made to look up at him, but nothing in her gaze shifted. The bird’s neck was still held tightly in in the ring of her thumb and first finger.

“Are you hungry?” She said, her voice was crackly, like she was just recovering from a sickness or hadn’t used it in a long time. His lip twitched at the unexpected question. Of course he was fucking hungry, he couldn’t remember the last time he had a full belly.

“What? Of course I’m hungry.”

She lifted the hand with the bird in it. “Lunch.” She quirked her eyebrows, daring him to contradict her.

So naturally he did.

“You think that little thing is enough for both of us?” Once it was plucked of its feathers and the meat free of its bones it would hardly be enough to make a single morsel on his tongue.

She pressed her hand to her chest, the bird curled within the palm of her hand and now hidden from his view.

“Would you like any of it?” Her stance changed, ready to bolt like a wild animal that had been spooked, and he didn’t doubt that she could outrun him easily. Especially on his empty stomach.

“…Yes,” he grit out.

“Start a fire then.”

He collected kindling with only half his mind, the other preoccupied by watching the young woman pluck the bird free of feathers. She had to take her gloves off to do it, her fingers thin and shaking in the cold, but their movements sharp and efficient.

A pile of feathers sat in her lap and would have resembled a stain of blood if not for the way a sudden breeze made them float on the wind.

“Cardinals are a sign of spring, you know,” she said, watching where the feathers fell and not looking up at him.

“Aye.”

“My father always said to be wary of false spring, of cardinals and crocuses.” She turned to him as she said that, sizing him up. For what he didn’t know.

“Just a bird,” he said, “and still bloody freezing.” He enunciated his point by dumping the kindling he had collected.

“Winter is here,” she said. Her scarf twitched, like maybe she was smiling.

It was a small fire for a small meal. The woman had a tin cup in the pack strapped to her back that would make do for a pan, and it seemed like a joke, how little food there was. Almost not worth it. But only almost.

Gendry kept his gloved hands by the small flame as the bird fried, trying to ignore the eyes on him.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Grew up in the city,” he admitted after a moment, noticing for the first time he didn’t know the woman’s name. “Where are you from?”

“North of here.”

He squinted up at her.

“Cedar Grove or Rock Ridge?” He asked. Most of the orphans were from Rock Ridge, there had been a collapse at one of the mines there and now the town was more or less abandoned, everyone trying to move south to warmer pastures.

“Further north.”

He couldn’t imagine living in a place colder than here. “Makes sense why you left then.”

She gave no opinion to his comment, but her eyes inspected the plane of his face in a way that made it seem she was withholding a response. She shook the attention off herself again. “What is a town dweller doing as huntsman in this forest?”

He wondered that himself sometimes, all his life he’s felt like one of those feathers that the wind just blew about as it pleased.

“I was a journeyman before I was a huntsman, this is where the journey brought me, and winter has kept me.” It was more complicated than that, but the thought of telling this stranger about the anger that had made him throw off his birthplace in the search of somewhere to belong made him uncomfortable. She didn’t need to know about it. He meant to shut up then, so he might shake off this encounter and the feeling that sitting across from this woman was instilling in him.

For a few minutes they sat in silence, except for the crackling of the fire, their bodies tense with hunger and cold. The woman broke it when the bird was cooked.

“I’m Arya.” She offered him the tin first, and he wondered if it was some sort of test of character. He took the biggest piece and was determined not to feel guilty about it.

“Gendry,” he said once he finished chewing. She made no comment about what he had eaten, just chose a piece to eat herself and handed the cup back to him. There were only two bites left, indistinct entrails. He ate his small portion, the food in his stomach only seemed to remind his body of how empty it was.

He stomped out the fire to distract himself from his hunger. Arya put away her cup, and Gendry went about resetting the trap. When he rose, ready to check the last two, he caught her watching him, something knowing in her eyes.

“They’re good traps.”

He blinked at the odd compliment, unsure how to reply, and wanting to keep this short so that he could get on his way.

“But be careful of bigger beasts.” She made hard eye contact with him, the look she sent at once a warning and a challenge.

He nodded slowly. “Thanks for the meal,” and then, because Jeyne would thrash him for failing to try and bring her in new business. “There’s an inn northwest of here, just off the main road. If you need a place to stay.”

“Then I might be seeing you,” Arya said with a quick nod, before turning on her heal and walking away without a backwards glance. Odd, that her words sounded like a promise.

The final two traps both snared hares.

…

Jeyne actually smiled when he stopped by the Inn with his catch that evening, and Willow caught him in a hug, whether a response to the food or for bettering her sister’s temper he didn’t know. He ate with the orphans that night, the lot of them yelling over each other and resorting to hair pulling and shin kicking at any given opportunity. It made him want to pull his hair out, but he said nothing, even when Samara used his thigh as a leg up to chuck her empty bowl at her sworn enemy of the evening.

He left before Jeyne managed to wrangle them into bed, their laughter and yells following him to the forge until the gusts of wind drowned them out. He slept past dawn the next day, even with the wind making the building shudder and the sky delivering eight more inches of snow. He spent most of the morning clearing out the area around his door and reinforcing the places in the walls where the cold, and sometimes the snow, tended to leak in.

The children were out with a force when he stopped by the Inn just after midday, clearing snow and gathering firewood.

“Gendry!” The oldest boy, Jimmie, called out when he spotted him. He was carrying Pen on his back, the one who had been sloppily peeling potatoes the other day. “We’re playing Knights and Squires!”

It was an invitation to join, but Gendry was more interested in a bowl of leftover soup. The proper meal had given the children enough energy to play, but Gendry knew well enough that his good luck yesterday couldn’t be relied upon.

“Just don’t catch your deaths while you do it,” Gendry said, still moving towards the relative warmth of the inn. Some of the children had their noses exposed, others tear tracks where the cold irritated their eyes, and yet they laughed and flung snow at each other. He wished for the careless invulnerability of childhood.

“Oh, please stay!” Jimmie begged, trailing after him. His youth exposing itself in his voice, high and seeking attention. “It’s been so exciting, Pen said he saw a wolf in the woods, so I was telling him how a knight would scare it off, and- “

“You saw what?” Gendry asked, a spark of fear shooting through him. He spoke lowly, not wishing to alert the other kids. His fists clenched at his side so as not to snap at the two boys who only blinked at him in confusion. Gendry narrowed his focus to Pen, his thin and shivering arms clutched around Jimmie’s neck, the hat on his head nearly swallowing his face. Gendry tried to school his expression into something calmer, as Pen shied away from him, suddenly conscious that the boy was likely quiet as he dealt with the loss of his parents.

“A wolf?” Pen nodded, making eye contact with Gendry only briefly. He didn’t seem the sort to tell fibs for attention. “Where?”

He pointed northwest, towards the river where Gendry had ventured yesterday. “It was big,” he offered, “and grey, but it didn’t howl or anything.”

Gendry nodded to demonstrate that he understood. “The next time you see a wolf or a bear, you gather everyone up and go inside and tell Jeyne, you hear me?”

“It’s alright, I was protecting them,” Jimmie said, because he thought he was brave and strong because he was tall for ten years old.

“Well the best way to protect them would be to get them inside,” Gendry said, maybe harsher than the boy deserved, but he hadn’t the forethought to check himself. “This isn’t summer, those wolves are hungry, they eat little boys and girls. That stick isn’t going to be scaring ‘em off.”

Jimmie’s brow was bent into a quivering bow at that, and he dropped Pen to his feet, the younger boy openly sniffling. Gendry refused to feel remorseful. Sometimes they needed to be scared to have any sense. It was better than learning the hard way.

“Go inside,” he said, softer now. Then louder, calling out to the rest of the children.

“What are you doing?” Jeyne asked when the dining area was full. She was holding a broom in her hand, and unlike Jimmie, Gendry believed she could do some damage with it. “That’s the first quiet I’ve had in ages.”

“Pen saw that wolf in the woods, not far at all. What’d I say about keeping them inside?”

Jeyne glared in that way that meant she was suppressing an eye role. “It could have been his imagination, maybe he overheard us the other day.”

“Do you want to risk that?”

Jeyne pulled her dark brows together. “Just one wolf wasn’t it? It’ll starve soon enough, lone wolves die.” He wanted to bite back, the wolf certainly hadn’t looked starving when he had seen it, and there was no proof it was alone. Did wolves hunt at night or day? He didn’t know.

“These kids are in enough danger as it is.”

Jeyne glared. He hadn’t wished to be harsh with her, but there wasn’t a way to take it back now.

“Since it’s your fault they’re all inside, you can wrangle them,” was all she had to say.

He turned away from Jeyne and talk of wolves and yelled at Mable to get her dirty boots off the table. By the time he had convinced the lot of ruffians to warm up by the fire the sun was low, and not for the first time Gendry cursed winter’s short days.

“Looks like more snow,” Willow said when she finished hauling in the snow she’d melt to wash the linens. There were flurries on her eyelashes. “You might want to stay the night Gendry.”

He’d prefer not to. The creakiness of the inn, which would only be worse in a storm, prevented him from ever getting a decent sleep. But he wouldn’t appreciate the trek back during a downfall, and even less if he couldn’t find his way in the swirling dark.

“I suppose,” he said. Willow nodded and ran off to get him a blanket and pillow. Whenever he was forced to stay at the inn he always slept by the large hearth in the main room. Jeyne used to raise a fuss about him not appreciating her comfortable beds, but he always found them too cold. The children kept warm enough, sleeping four to a bed, but the drafty upper rooms chilled his bones when he was used to his cot in the forge, tucked right up next to the fireplace. His stubbornness had won out eventually and now it wasn’t even a point of contention.

“There you go,” Willow said, dumping the quilt in his lap. “You better like that one, Samara finished fixing it up just yesterday.”

He took it gratefully and used it to cushion his seat for the moment, keeping his eyes on the kids while he waited for supper.

It was soup again, thinner than it had been the day before, but still warm and with enough flavor to sit warm and comforting in his belly.

“Jeyne, why can’t we have bread?” Selma complained, using her finger to scrape off the last drops from her bowl.

“You’ll notice that we don’t have the flour to make it. Mills can’t turn when the all the rivers are frozen.” She didn’t mention that they didn’t have the money for it either. There hadn’t been a visitor in at least a year and a trader hadn’t stopped by since winter began.

Selma pouted all the same, the effect of the look undermined with her finger in her mouth. Jeyne looked at the end of her patience. Seeming to sense this, Willow jumped in, asking for volunteers for the washing up. Gendry came to her aid too, grabbing the attention of the younger bunch and telling them the story of the cardinal he had seen, a sign of spring. He wasn’t a good storyteller, but it was enough for the kids to go off on their own tangents and to organize a contingent of eager birdwatchers who took themselves upstairs for a better view, never mind the dark and the snow.

With their babble gone, Gendry could hear the swirl of the wind outside, the sort of soft sound it had that let him know snow was falling with it. Soft at the moment.

“When do you think this winter is going to end?” Jeyne said with a heavy sigh, sitting down and kicking up her feet next to where he sat.

He thought about what Arya had said in the woods yesterday, about false spring.

“Hopefully soon,” he said, “but I don’t know.”

Jeyne closed her eyes. She was a year younger than him but there were deep lines in her forehead as she squeezed her eyes tight, like she was trying to erase even the blackness from behind them. She pulled her shawl tighter to her body and her heavy exhale did a better job of shaking the shutters than the wind outside.

The quiet was good for her so he didn’t disturb it except to tend the fire. He was tempted to stoke it higher, like he would in the forge, but he knew there wasn’t enough firewood to go around. Willow emerged from doing the laundry, her forearms pink from the hot water. She shooed off her helpers before approaching her sister.

“Let’s go to bed now.”

Jeyne grumbled and her pout earned Willow’s smile. Gendry hadn’t even realized she had fallen asleep.

“Come on,” she continued to encourage, “we’ll sleep a little late tomorrow, won’t be able to go out with all the snow we’re gettin’ anyway.” Jeyne got up and moved to go upstairs, her hands still buried in the sleeves of her shawl. “Goodnight Gendry,” Willow whispered and then followed her sister to bed.

His arms ached from a morning of moving snow and he stretched them over his head, wondering if he’d be strong enough to return to smithing after so many years without it. Winter became more dangerous with every day it remained, and Gendry doubted that spring would feel the way he remembered when it returned, like a snowbank too thick to melt despite the hot sun.

He arranged himself on the ground next to the fireplace, bracing himself against the brick as he laid down, blackening his hands with soot for the first time in ages. It was with grit under his fingernails that he found an easy sleep.

…

It was a violent blast that woke him, the inn door open and the cold gladly finding room to occupy. He was on his feet in an instant, even with the dregs of sleep pulling on his eyes. It was too cold to dawdle; the wind was properly thrashing now.

The door was in hand before he noticed the figure that had opened it. It was Arya, rather than the gust of wind he had assumed. Her dark furs were the same as they had been the other day, and they blended in well with the night. It was only the dim firelight catching on the new red fox fur around her neck that made her shape visible. 

Arya moved towards the fireplace without a word to him, taking a new log in hand as she prodded what little was still burning with the poker. She looked the same as she had days earlier, only colder.

He sat next to her, taking his pillow that was half squashed under her thigh and settling it in her lap, hoping it would help warm her. She was shaking so hard he felt as if he could hear her bones rattle. It was many long minutes before she was comfortable enough to pull the scarf from her face.

“It is a bad storm,” she said, her whole face a bitten red. Her eyes looked like crystals, nearly frozen in her head.

“No shit.” Now that he was awake the building seemed to sway with it and even the fireplace wasn’t warm enough, a draft coming down the chimney. “Are you alright?”

“Better now. I’ll need to stay here a couple nights at least.”

Gendry nodded in agreement. It wasn’t his place to grant her entry, and he really should wake Jeyne, but it would be inhumane to turn her out and he didn’t need Jeyne’s opinion to know that. All waking her would do would make him have to confront her dark mood in the morning.

“I couldn’t give you a room unless you have something to pay with, but you can talk to the innkeeper about it in the morning.”

“This work as payment?” She lifted the fox fur from his shoulders, and he realized it wasn’t a fur at all, but the whole animal, meat still on its bones.

“Yeah,” he breathed, accepting it and hanging it in the kitchen on one for the hooks meant for chickens. When he came back to the main room Arya hadn’t moved.

“I don’t need a room,” she said, hearing his approach. “I won’t kick any of those kids from their beds. I bet it’s warmer here anyway.”

How did she know about the orphans? He paused, standing next to her.

“Are you from around here?”

Arya turned to look at him, her face less blotchy from the cold now and her eyes warm. The firelight uses her face as a canvas, each image it flickered onto it more beautiful than the last. It was amazing all that a scarf could conceal.

“I already told you I’m not.” She had a challenging smirk.

“Well how long have you lived ‘round here?” He was trying to keep his voice quiet and level so as not to wake anyone else, but it was difficult. He felt too awake for whispering. “Where do you live?”

“In a cave,” she admitted, but not offering specifics. “And not for long, only a couple weeks.”

“Gods,” he said, he couldn’t imagine sleeping on the frozen ground. “Why the hell were you doing that?”

“I’m looking for my sister,” she said. “And my mother, if she’s alive after all.”

She was a traveler then, a mad one maybe, for trudging through winter rather than hunkering down for it. But she seemed strong and brave, noble too for looking for her lost family, so he didn’t comment on her probable lunacy.

“Well are they around here?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t still be looking for them, now would I?” He glared at her and she continued after a moment. “I’ve heard rumors.”

That was enough of an explanation for Gendry, who didn’t like people prying into his business and was thus not likely to do the same for others.

“You warm enough? I’ll get another blanket.” He went to the kitchen to pull one of the now dry blankets down from where Willow hung them. When he returned, Arya had since rearranged herself, she was curled on the brick hearth inches from the fire, his pillow under her head. She had just hiked through a blizzard, so he supposed he’d let that slide. “Careful now you don’t roll into the fire in your sleep,” he said instead. 

“There’s a grate,” Arya said, not opening her eyes. Her hair was certainly thin enough to slip through its gaps and light her up.

“I don’t wanna be dealing with your burnt scalp is all.”

He draped the quilt over her, making sure to cover her bare feet. Her woolen socks, soaked through, were laid to dry right next to her. Arya peaked one eye open at him, tucking herself deeper under the cover. She moved her head a little further from the fire, even as she refused to move the pillow. Her quiet thanks was nearly overtaken by the crack of a log in the hearth. 

He made himself comfortable again on the floor. It was difficult without a pillow, but he wasn’t about to rummage in the dark to find a replacement. The crook of his arm did well enough, even knowing it would be numb in the morning. Sleep took its time in returning, the whistling wind in the chimney too much of a distraction. Gendry started counting Arya’s soft breaths instead; he got as high as eighty-eight before he fell asleep.

…

It was still snowing when he woke up, and, judging from the frown on Willow’s face across the room as she peered through the slats in the door, it didn’t seem to be letting up. None of the others were awake yet, and while Arya was shifting in her sleep, her eyes remained shut.

Gendry muffled a cough in his elbow as he stood and moved to stand by Willow.

“How much longer will it be?” He asked, ducking his head to get a look outside. The snow was at least waist high as it was, trapping would be a nightmare for weeks.

“Hours more probably,” she whispered, “the wind isn’t up at least. We won’t have any big drifts to worry about.” She looked over to Arya. “She come in last night?” He nodded.

“I said she could to talk to Jeyne about a room this morning, didn’t want ‘er freezing.”

“She brought that fox with her, yeah? Jeyne won’t be throwin’ her out.” Willow stepped away from the door, rubbing her arms. “Might wake her soon through, I want to get the fire going properly.”

“I’m up,” Arya called out, sitting up from her perch. Her voice was clear, and she sounded well rested for someone who slept on brick. It stood in contrast to the mussed appearance of her face and hair. There was soot coating one cheek, like he had held it in his hand after a long day of work. He blinked the thought away. “Thank you for your hospitality. I’m Arya.” She handed back the quilt, already folded, and then began the process of fixing her hair, face wincing as her fingers caught on snags.

“It’s no thing,” Willow said and then went about introducing herself and asking if Arya knew any good recipes for fox. They went back into the kitchen together as Gendry got the fire going, already dreading the day of clearing snow that was promised.

His sour musings were interrupted by steps on the stair. It was Ria, rocking her younger brother on her hip. Nev was three and could only mumble a few words, crying like a newborn babe at unfamiliar hands, and eyes that stared too long. His hands stayed glued to his sister skirts, and she spent all her waking hours occupied with him, winning smiles with a patience that seemed to stretch long enough to cross the Narrow Sea. Gendry couldn’t help but feel bad for her at times, twelve and already a mum of sorts.

Nev was fussing now, in a manner unbecoming of a toddler. Ria paced the length of the room, smiling at Gendry shyly, as if she were the guest and not him. He gave an encouraging nod and Ria began to sing. The words fell on a gasp of breath, the lyrics hardly carrying. It was a dark rhyme about a mother and her daughters, a local song that Gendry had never heard in his childhood, but that Ria and Willow repeated often. By the time she gathered breath for the second chorus, Nev had calmed in her arms. Ria moved to sit with him in her lap instead, bouncing her knee as she waited for breakfast.

“You two warm enough last night?” Gendry asked, noticing the tattered material of Ria’s dress. Her petticoats would be enough to warm her legs, but there was no helping her arms. She could use a shawl like Jeyne’s.

“I could’ve been warmer,” was all she said, the exhaustion slipping from her lips louder than her words. It made sense then, why she only sang about the misfortunes of children.

“We’ll make sure you are tonight,” he promised. Nev made a gurgling sound, and Gendry felt lighter for a moment, before Ria spoke again.

“I don’t really think they’ll make a difference.”

So long as winter stayed none of them would be warm. He wished it were not a truth the children had to be confronted with, wished that everyone could have grown up in a pleasant summer. A sick feeling churned in his stomach, as he remembered the false hope for spring he’d given the children the night before. The lie wasn’t worth their moment of distraction.

“Sure they will,” said Arya, returning to the main room with clean linens bundled in her arms. “Winter is harsh, but we all make do.” She shared a long look with Ria, the moment only broken when Nev made to scramble out of her lap. Ria watched him move about, and remained unconvinced, even after Arya dropped one of the blankets in her lap before going upstairs to store them wherever Willow had instructed.

Perhaps it was Arya, her feet unexperienced in which boards to avoid, that awoke the rest of the household, for a pack descended just after she made her way back down the stairs.

“We’ll be eating in a few minutes,” Willow called out, anticipating the calls of the children. She came out with a hot kettle and set in on the long table. The children filtered in and out of the kitchen grabbing mugs, Hana kind enough to think of delivering one to him.

There was no tea because there was no trade in winter, so they all drank hot water, enjoying the feel of the cup in their hands more than anything. As he did most mornings, Gendry pretended it was tea and tried to conjure the flavor in his mind, but it had been so long, and the drink simply burned his tongue instead.

“Gendry are you staying today?” Jimmie asked, impatient for his breakfast.

“Aye, I’ll help clear the snow. We need to be out there soon, once breakfast is done. Never mind that it’s still falling,” he said, anticipating complaints.

“But we did that yesterday,” Selma said.

“And we’ll do it again, dozens of times probably.”

Selma looked ready to throw a fit until Hana tugged her hair and told her to stop whining like a baby. The pair where slapping and pinching each other in the next moment, cruel names thrown like it was a stoning.

Gendry blinked, it was too early for their sudden ferocity.

“That’s quite enough.” Arya’s voice struck like a bell, not sharp, as she seemed to be in other moments, but stern, and with tremendous power. Her lips were set in a thin line, as if to prevent them from trembling, and her eyes were stormy, although not in anger. The girls’ hands flew to their laps at the reprimand from a stranger. “You’re sisters, aren’t you? Try to get along.” They mumbled apologies and shifted further apart.

“Thanks,” he said as she took the seat next to them. “It’s hard to get between their squabbles sometimes.”

“I have a sister, I know what it’s like.” She sipped at her cup. “You don’t have siblings, do you?”

“No siblings,” he confirmed, “and I wasn’t the type that other kids picked on.”

She looked him up and down. “No, I bet you weren’t.”

He huffed a laugh and brought the hot water to his lips. “What’s your sister like then? You fight like that?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “We’re very different. But she’s my family so I have to look out for her. Make sure she’s safe.”

It sounded nice, having someone care enough to seek you out in the thick of winter, when they risked exposure and hunger, and a dozen other ills. Gendry drank more of his hot water and reminded himself it was stupid to wish for impossible things.

“Well I hope you find her,” he said. “And your mother too.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Willow’s entrance, a pot of porridge in her arms. The kids swarmed to get their ladleful, but Gendry’s eyes were still on Arya, and he caught the anxiety written on her face before she blinked it away. The idea of a reunion seemed to cause her heart to rattle. He’d remember to not ask questions about her mother or sister again.

Jeyne finally made an appearance right after Gendry filled his bowl. She didn’t exactly look well rested, but she didn’t shout when Mable spilled her breakfast down her chest and onto the table, so her mood must have improved slightly with her sleep. It took her a long moment to notice Arya, even as she sat across from her and Gendry chuckled at the way her eyes perked up at the sight of a guest.

“I’m Jeyne, the innkeeper,” she said, stretching over the table for an odd handshake. “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier. You interested in a room?”

“It wasn’t a problem, I just slept by the fire down here last night, though I would like a room if you have one available. For the rest of the week, preferably. I dropped off a fox with your sister, but if that’s not enough payment I’ll do some work around here. You’ll need help clearing the snow at least.”

“Yes plenty of rooms,” Jeyne said, just barely managing to smother a laugh at the implication that the inn might be full. “And paying your way will be just fine. I’ll show you upstairs after we finish eating.”

Breakfast went by all too fast, and it was with unenthusiastic movements that he bundled himself in his cloak and furs, armed with a shovel. All the abled orphans and Willow joined him, Selma complaining reliably and Jimmie loading too much snow onto each shovelful. Arya appeared too, halfway through clearing the inn’s perimeter. It took near three hours to clear enough snow to ensure that they wouldn’t be trapped by a drift and by that time it was slowing, the flakes lighter and fluffier.

The softer snow improved moods. Nearly as much as the hot water, spiced with something woody, that Jeyne had waiting for them when they came back inside.

“Weather’s lookin’ up,” Willow said to Jeyne as she sat herself by the fire. “When’s supper?”

“When it’s ready,” Jeyne answered, never one to respond well to pestering.

“Do you need any help?” Arya asked. She was still shaking snow off her outer layers, her nose red, but already eager for the next task. Her restless energy was evident enough in her movements, the jerky way she kicked snow off her soles, the stalking way she paced.

Jeyne, somehow, seemed to miss it. Instead insisting that she sit and rest. Arya remained standing, certainly not the pampered guest.

“You can come to my forge with me after we eat,” he offered, “The roof’s near flat and I wouldn’t mind some help clearing the snow off it.”

“More shoveling, great,” she said, but by the time the fox was served she had agreed to come. They left promptly once the meal was finished, wanting to make the most of the remaining daylight. The snow stopped on the way over.

“Did you build this or did you inherit it?” Arya asked, sizing up his forge.

“Claimed it,” he said, “did the refurbishments myself. It’s insulated now at least.”

Arya hummed. “I just figured building it with a flat roof would be something a city dweller would do.”

“I’m not stupid,” he said even though he hadn’t the faintest how one went about building a forge, he only knew how to work one. “I think there was meant to be another floor above it, lodgings for a family or the like, but the builder never finished and slapped a clumsy roof on instead.”

He knew that for a fact, how the last blacksmith left in a rush to serve a new, threatening employer. The girl who was meant to marry him had told Willow all about it before she moved south. But Gendry didn’t like thinking about the Lady’s forms of recruitment, so he made no mention of it to Arya.

“A project for you in the spring then?” They stepped inside, inevitably kicking snow onto the floor. It was dark and cold, he had been away for too long.

He grunted, unsure of his answer, and uncomfortable with the question. Arya’s eyes lingered on him before taking the rest of the room, the rack of tools on the left wall, the anvil, off center of where it should sit, his cot replacing it. She sat on the chest that held his apron and extra shirts and retied her boots.

“You should consider it, this is a good setup and you’re close to a busy road, when people are actually traveling you could make a lot of business.”

He wasn’t accustomed to others asking after him. Willow asked about where he was from sometimes, desperate for stories of the world outside the twenty miles she knew. Ria might ask him for songs, so as not to run all the same ditties into the dirt. But no one ever asked about him, about his thoughts or desires or history. He stoked a fire instead of considering what this near-stranger’s concern meant to him.

“Well ignore me then.” He wasn’t ignoring her, just her words. He handed her a shovel with a smirk.

“Maybe I’ll climb up on this roof just to push you off,” she said, even as she yanked the tool from his grip.

“With the snow as high as it is it’s only about a five-foot drop.”

“Oh, I’ll make it seem longer.”

Gendry didn’t know what she meant by that, but he chuckled anyway. It made the process of clearing enough space on the roof to be able to get a leg up a lot easier.

After giving Arya a hand so that she could clamber onto the roof, they got to work. Gendry stopped briefly to yell at her not to dump the snow right in front of the door, obviously, and from then they started chattering on, about the snow mostly, and it was a nice distraction from his stiff fingers and tired shoulders. He made no complaints because Arya didn’t. She was strong for her stature, and had practice moving snow, doing so with an efficiency that had taken him months to learn. They made a good team, and it wasn’t long until he felt confident the roof wouldn’t buckle from the weight of the snow.

He and Arya leaned on their shovels, catching their breaths for a brief moment. You could see the inn clearly from up here, better than from on the ground, and it seemed stable and permeant among the trees. The smoke of the chimney was dark and twisting against an orange sky peppered with pink clouds.

“I wasn’t expecting it to be so pretty,” Arya said. Gendry didn’t particularly think it was, but he might have just been desensitized to the view. He had felt wonder with his first snowfall but that was before he’d gotten sick of the stuff.

“It’ll be prettier when it’s green.” He expected her to argue for some reasons, their interactions suggested to him that she was something of a contrarian, but she nodded in agreement instead.

The forge was toasty when they slipped back inside, and Gendry left out a sigh of relief, taking off his gloves and flexing his fingers to get the blood rushing back to them. Arya did the same, pinching at her ears as she sat on his empty workbench. Idly, she brushed dust and crumbs off it.

“Do you miss the work?” She asked, growing plaintive for a moment, “Doing what you’re supposed to be doing?”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t a hard thing to admit, but any kind of intricate understanding of how he felt about it would be even harder to parse out.

“Then why give it up? There’s still need of blacksmiths in any big city, or even most towns.”

“They’ll still be there when winter is over, those orphans might not be, if I left.”

The sky was beginning to darken outside as dusk approached, but he didn’t need daylight to feel Arya’s assessing eyes on him. “Why do you care?” Arya’s tone was confusing, as if her words were both accusing and relieved.

It would be easy to say something about doing the right thing, but there had been plenty of times in his life where he could have done some good and had turned his head instead. “I’m an orphan too,” he said instead. Then, with the explanation feeling insufficient, he continued. “I was staying in the Inn at the end of autumn, it was just supposed to be one night, but…”

He paused, conversation was the only sort of entertainment or occupation to be had, but he wondered at how trustworthy she was. There were things you had to be careful saying, in these parts.

She wasn’t from here though, just a woman looking for her family. She’d be gone before too long. If she wanted to carry some part of his story in her memory, Gendry found that he wouldn’t mind.

The words fell from his lips on shaky legs despite the memory of his first week at the inn being as sharp as if it were a pin stuck in his side these past three years. There wasn’t a time he could remember speaking so much.

“Even back then they were minding orphans, a mine near here collapsed in mid-autumn, seventeen men died in it, and then more trying to get them out. Lots of kids without parents then.

“Jeyne and Willow were orphaned too that night, their mother died of some inner illness. I dug her grave and Jeyne didn’t charge me for the room, but the ground was so near frozen it took me all day, so I stayed an extra night.”

The beds had been warm enough back then, but if he had slept at the fireplace maybe the tension of the morning could have been avoided.

Arya smiled at him, almost wistful. “It’s nice,” she said, “knowing there are people with kind hearts. There aren’t many, even the ones who think they’re doing the right thing...”

She sounded judgmental and self-accusatory all at once, but the way her sentence drifted off especially made him pause. “Do you know her then? The Lady?” A creature like her would surely be referred to critically by anyone in who knew these woods. Gendry was no philosopher, but the moral ground the Lady and her band stood on was uneven at best.

“You've seen her?” Arya interrupted, ignoring his question while answering it. She wasn’t sitting anymore, instead standing in his space, close enough to touch if his hand so much as twitched. She stared at his face, eyes locked on his as if that would be enough to beat out the truth. He dared not look away.

“Aye, just that next morning.” He didn’t like remembering the look of her, the pale grey of her skin, red lines on her cheeks that always looked fresh, the skin that flapped over the cut in her throat, useless and dead. Worse perhaps was how none of her steps made any noise, as if she was simply a nightmare carried on the wind rather than a being that had once stroked his cheek. “She’s always needing new people for her cause because they die in raids or from the chills out in the snow like they are. ‘Course the Lady doesn’t get hungry or feel the cold, and she doesn’t care much when people die. She was there the morning I was meant to leave, wanted rations from the inn’s stores and for Jeyne to come with her because she can cook and sew and knows these woods. She couldn’t stand up for herself, could hardly talk, she was still cryin’ so much because of her mam.”

Arya looked close to crying now too. Her eyes were shining this close to his face, her throat constricting in an uneven pattern. The taste of dread would do that.

Should he comfort her? His fingers twitched but they still weren’t touching. His mouth was easier to move than any other part of his body in that moment, so he kept talking, his hands now curled into loose fists. “I was confused, didn’t know what was going on, so I told them right off to leave the grieving girl alone. One o’ them tried to explain, and I said it wasn’t too late for them to learn to sew.”

Arya laughed then, just a brief chuckle, but it cleared the tears from her eyes, allowed her shoulders to relax. She took a step back, brushed her hands against her hips.

“I don’t think I scared ‘em away really, but they must’ve known that those kids needed minding, and they left without more trouble. Willow was so grateful, and it…I promised to stay and help.” He wasn’t even goaded into it. The force of Willow’s hug had him offering to stay, something about how how warm and _needed_ it had made him feel. Moving into the abandoned forge, learning to tie snares and shoot a crossbow had all come after that. So had the hunger pains, and the runny nose that never really went away; reflecting about it now he found that he didn’t regret any of it.

Arya drifted closer to the fire. Looking at her in the firelight he thought her beautiful, with a passion and burning curiosity to match the flames. It contrasted like a slap to the words that followed.

“You know, the Lady is my mother.” 

“…Oh.”

Her fierceness made more sense now, as did the tears in her eyes from a moment ago. Maybe she was more than a stranger in the woods after all. A folk creature instead, the daughter of a walking dead woman. Without question he believed her. He wondered if it was his place to tell her that her mother was dead after all.

“What they say about her is true,” Arya continued. “That bandits killed her husband and her sons. And her anger revived her from the dead so that she might hunt and hang like-hearted men. The stories all seem to forget that she had two daughters. Maybe don’t tell anyone else at the inn that.”

“I won’t,” he promised. This felt like the first important secret he’d ever been told. It felt good, to be seen as trustworthy.

“Thanks. I just…don’t know what I’ll do when I see her again. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”

Her tone was grim, and the fire passing shadows across her face now served to illuminate a fury in her face.

“How long have you been looking for them?”

Arya turned back to look at him. “Only the past few months. Before I…had similar goals to my mother.” It didn’t scare him, to hear her say that. Not in the way the Lady had scared him. Probably it was because she was alive, that he had seen her shiver, had seen her hungry, had seen her smile. If she had killed before—and he didn’t doubt she had, she was a hunter—he wouldn’t think less of her for it. Just thinking about Jeyne or Willow being murdered, any of the children, made his fingers twitch for a knife capable of stabbing.

“I realized that I’d rather piece together what was left of my family. Make the pack grow.”

Part of him wished to ask how she came to such a realization, she was so interesting, and he couldn’t deny having more questions. How she had survived what had killed the rest of her family, how she had lived by herself through winter. But he wasn’t quite sure if she would mind him asking. In his hesitation, the moment of opportunity to ask passed. Arya stepped away from the fire then, closer to him. Her face dipped into shadow, twilight doing little to illuminate her. At least he had something to ask her tomorrow. He hoped he’d get to talk to her more.

“You’ll want to be getting back before it’s too dark. I’ve seen a wolf in the woods lately.”

Arya smiled, although he hadn’t said anything joke worthy.

“I’m not afraid of wolves. Goodnight, Gendry.”

She sounded daft, but before he could tell her as much, she had slipped out the door.

…

Three thumps on his door interrupted his sleep earlier than he was quite willing to give it up. Gendry leapt out of bed regardless, convinced there was some sort of crisis. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone from the Inn had made the trip to his forge, especially so early in the morning. He threw open the door to be met with Arya, dressed and packed for a day of trekking. A muscle in his jaw twitched at the thought that she might be leaving already, she had asked for a room for a week, but maybe she had decided to cut her stay short.

“Well, good morning,” she said, pulling down her scarf. Her cheeks were rosy and she offered him a small smile. It relieved some of his worry. “Willow suggested I come hunting with you today. Are you going to let me in?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. Even in the few seconds the door had been open, the cold had begun nipping at his arms and neck, along with other places his skin was exposed. He began the process of layering clothes over himself as Arya closed the door and talked.

“I don’t exactly think it would be helpful to dig out your traps with the snow still so high, so I thought it best if we did some hunting. At least prints will be easy to see in the snow.”

Gendry nodded as he looked for his snowshoes, they always made him feel imbalanced, but it was better than sinking waist-deep in snow.

“Do you normally take this long to get ready in the morning?” Arya asked as he readied the rest of his supplies, checking his tools and crossbow. “The earlier you get out to hunt, the better. How long have you been doing this?”

“The sun just rose,” he grumbled, finally feeling prepared and pulling on his gloves. It wasn’t as if he was a stranger to early mornings, as an apprentice he would wake well before daybreak to start the fires and mind the bellows, and he had done so for years before he was allowed to even touch a hammer. The truth was it had taken ages for him to fall asleep the night before, an anxious sort of anticipation keeping him up too late. He’d slept longer to compensate, it seemed.

“Well it’s better to be up before,” Arya continued on, even as he opened the door to leave. For moment he stopped to consider where the best spot would be, before settling on northwest. He led the way, but not without receiving complaints.

“Why are we going this way?”

“I’m sorry, who actually lives in these woods again?”

“We shouldn’t be going north,” Arya protested, “The animals all go south. There isn’t any food or grass this way.”

“But there’s cave systems this way. And some animals like shelter as much as food these days, what with the snow.”

“And why should I trust your judgement? You don’t seem to make a great hunter.” He bristled a bit. Sure, his aim wasn’t great, but he had made do for this long. She seemed to trust him yesterday, the turn of opinion stung like the wind in his eyes.

A challenge rose to his tongue and he turned to confront Arya, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She was tense, but not at the fault of the cold. Like she was approaching a place she didn’t want to go.

“Are they the same caves you were staying in?”

“We should go south,” she said, her eyes steely as they turned to look at him.

“Is there something there you’re afraid of?” If she was going to ignore his questions, he’d ignore her demands.

“No.” She was unflinching, so he believed her. That didn’t stop him from suspecting there was another issue. Especially with the way her eyes were judging him.

“You think there’s something I’ll be afraid of?”

“Stop being bullheaded and listen to me. We should go south.”

“You’re just making me want to go north even mo—“ A howl pierced the air to the north of them. The sound was rich, and that meant it was near. Gendry didn’t miss preparing his crossbow this time.

Arya was alert at his side, but her hands were empty. He looked where she was looking and saw movement through the trees. There was no mistaking its gait for anything but a wolf. It was far enough away for now, but it could definitely smell them. Likely it could hear them too, they hadn’t been quiet with their little argument.

He was about to concede and agree that they should head south, but Arya, who must have been mad or the bravest woman alive, began to take slow steps towards where they had seen the blur of the wolf’s movements. Not to be outdone, Gendry walked beside her.

They pushed past low-hanging branches, careful not to break them off. Gendry tried to keep his steps as light as Arya’s and while he wasn’t loud on the freshly fallen snow, he didn’t possess the lean grace Arya used to slip between trees. They stopped when they reached the first of the wolf’s paw prints. It was massive, more than the size of his hand with his fingers spread, and his hands were larger than most men’s too. It had to have been part of the same pack as the wolf that had left the hare’s leg.

Arya hadn’t even given it a second glance, her eyes instead following the hind of the wolf as it stalked away from them. Gendry didn’t question this being the second instance of the creature walking away from him, he just raised his crossbow. There was no opportunity for it to be a fatal shot, but certainly he could wound it enough to get closer for the kill.

He had lifted the bow, but his finger had settled on the trigger for only a breath before a weight pushed into his right side and he fell on his left. The crossbow dropped from his hands and it was only with a concerted effort and twist of his legs that he saved from being mangled from his weight. He was on his stomach in the next moment, a weight pressing just below his shoulder blades, Arya’s knee probably.

“Wha? Get off me!” It took very little effort on his part to push her off, or maybe she wasn’t trying very hard to pin him. He sat up, prepared to yell at Arya, but she wasn’t even looking at him, and her distraction stole the complaint from his mouth. Her eyes were still focused on the wolf, far enough away by now that he could hardly see it at all. “I had a decent shot you know,” he said, but even to his own ears the words sound flat. Her proximity was distracting, more so even than the tackle had been.

Now that the wolf was gone Arya found the wherewithal to glare at him. It sent his heart off on a footrace.

“I didn’t want you shooting it.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Arya’s glare softened and she helped him stand up, even picked up his crossbow and dusted off the snow. Not before removing the bolt from the tiller.

“It’s a wolf alone, out during the day. It howled because it was lonely.”

All Gendry could do for a moment was blink at her. He struggled to understand her sympathy for the creature. “Lonely. I think it’s more likely hungry.”

“Not with how well fed it is. It’s a good sign that it’s so big, that means there’s plenty of game. Enough for us too.”

“Sorry,” he said, not feeling very sorry, “But I don’t think I care if the wolf is hungry or lonely. It’s still a danger.”

“Well if you attack it, maybe,” Arya said, her sarcasm heavy and he couldn’t help but feel hurt from her mocking. Except it wasn’t hurt, the clench in his chest came from anger. With only a few sentences and a softening glare she had set his blood pacing.

“Yes I’d attack it!” He spat, his shoulders shaking. Snow had crept beneath his collar when he’d been knocked to the ground, but it wasn’t the only cause of his savage shiver. “There are ten people three miles from here who are under my protection and you know what? They’re threatened by a wolf the size of a small horse!”

The derisive furrow of Arya’s eyebrows smoothed at his outburst, her eyes conveying a small apology. He let his anger slip away. “I don’t think it will attack at the inn. There’re too many people there for a lone wolf. Besides it’s clearly well fed, and wolves don’t prefer the taste of men.”

“And how would you know that?” He had heard enough stories, even back in the city, of a ferocious pack that could sniff out an evil man and tear his arm from his shoulder, his head from his neck. It was the basis for one of Ria’s favorite songs.

“I ran with them.” It was as close to an incomprehensible sentence as he had ever heard. But Arya was dead serious. Once again there was no lie in her face. His mind constructed an image of Arya’s fierce face shrouded in her furs as she stalked the woods with wolves at her sides; it made sense, when she smiled her mouth was full of fangs. That idea of her didn’t scare Gendry though, not like the actual wolf did.

“You’re a feral wolf-girl then?” He didn’t realize he was smiling until Arya chuckled.

“Not feral no. My mother taught me my manners.” Her mother, the dead woman whose brotherhood of men hunted down and killed criminals without trial. The one who had taught the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ Arya had offered so easily at the inn. What a strange place their world was.

“Alright then,” he said, at a lost for other words. He strapped the crossbow back into place and began walking again. South this time.

Arya stepped out ahead, just half a foot in front of him, as if in competition.

“You know, we’re far behind schedule now. We’ll spend the day out here till our hair freezes and have nothing to show for it.” The ability of Arya’s mood to shift with the wind was reassuring. He was too accustomed to long, stable weeks of Jeyne’s sour glares and Mable’s peculiar fixations and Jimmie’s aching desperation to be a man. Arya was stubborn and insistent and quick to anger but at least she had the ability to rationalize. He liked these moments when she didn’t take anything too seriously, it was fun to argue with her.

“And that’s my fault I suppose?”

“Of course, you slept far too late and then set us off in the wrong direction.”

“Well I don’t remember being the one to follow the wolf for no reason even further along the wrong direction.”

“At least you recognize it was wrong.”

He rolled his eyes. “And you followed me anyway.”

Arya scoffed, said something about playing the long game, and turned to look at him with smiling eyes. Gods, he wished he could see the quirk of her lips too.

Their conversation turned to the best type of game in this area and Gendry felt his stomach constrict as they talked about deer. It had been so long since he had eaten venison. Arya had laughed at his admission, but then admitted that while she had eaten venison recently, she was such a poor cook that it almost didn’t count. Jeyne’s fox was the best she’d eaten in years.

It was nice having company. No one had come out on a hunt with him since Willow had showed him how to set a snare. Jimmie had tried to convince him once to take him along, but the dead of winter wasn’t the time to teach a boy how to track and shoot. Having Arya beside him now was pleasant, almost fun, and it made him realize how alone he had been. He refused to let himself think about how lonely he’d be again when she moved on as they discussed different bird calls, and competed with each other to show off their whistling skills.

“Look there,” Arya said, at almost midday. Usually at this point when he was out hunting by himself, he was miserable—cold down to his bones with raw lips and only able to think about how wretched he felt. Arya was a good distraction as well as good company. He even felt warmer.

She was pointing to a burrow in the ground, maybe twenty paces off. It would be a waiting game now, hoping for a rabbit to emerge. They settled among the brush that had most likely determined the rabbits’ choice in making its den. Arya unsheathed a sharp hunting knife, the same one that she had used to cut up the cardinal and gripped in her left hand in preparation. 

The crouch he sat in was uncomfortable, but it was better than sitting his arse in the snow, if only by a margin. Now that he and Arya were no longer moving the cold felt sharp and overwhelming. He trembled even with his efforts to stay still and his molars ground together despite the clench of his jaw.

“You’re meant to be staying still,” Arya said, even as she looked at him with sympathy. She must have been cold too, even if the symptoms didn’t manifest in her so physically. Neither of them dared state the obvious and complain aloud about the temperature.

“I know,” he said with a huff, savoring the moment when his breath was warm as it escaped his lips before it bounced back against the scarf covering his mouth, colder than it was before.

“Here.” With a tug Arya looped her non-dominant elbow through his, bringing their sides flushed together. Unceremoniously she took his free hand and settled it in her lap under the outermost of her furs. She did the same with her own, resting her right hand on his inner thigh. For a moment it was all he was aware of. A whole nest of rabbits could have emerged at the moment and he would have been none the wiser because somehow, through his two layers and her glove besides, her hand felt warm. His blood melted a little after that. “I think that’s better,” Arya said, and he could only nod, turning his focus determinedly to the burrow.

But Gods did he want to look at her face.

He dreamed for a moment, of hunting with her in spring, when they would have no need of scarves or extra furs, when there would be deer and rabbits aplenty, and sweet berries too. His eyes itched with the vision, but he refused to move his free hand from where it laid so he blinked away the thought, replacing it with reason. She’d only be staying a handful more days.

It was better to live in the moment, to appreciate the way her arm was locked with his as they studied the neat hole in the ground with rapt attention. They must’ve been there an hour, managing, by the skin of their teeth, not to freeze in place.

Eventually it was worth it, a rabbit emerged and scurried to some of the bushes to their left where the plants got enough sun to have lichens growing on the otherwise bare branches. He and Arya exhaled in unison. He felt her tense besides him, her legs tightening in preparation to pounce as she moved her knife hand slowly so as not to cause a disturbance.

Without warning she pounced with all of a wolf’s force and decisive dive. She could have caught fish in a running stream she was so quick, the animal barely had the opportunity to squeal it was dead before Arya’s knife cut into it.

“You’re amazing,” he found himself saying without thought. “How did you do that?”

She looked up from cleaning her knife with a teasing tilt of her head, and he suspected for a moment that she was about to call him a poor hunter again. Instead she explained, running through the importance of having your weight light on your toes, of being still and calm, of picturing the point of attack and anticipating how your body would need to move.

“And lots of practice,” she added, and he offered her a hand. After shaking out the stiffness behind their knees they began the walk back.

“You learned from the wolves?” He asked, thinking he had held off his curiosity for an admirable length of time.

“Sort of,” she said, and she didn’t seem ashamed as she talked of it. Sincere and honest. “It’s different of course, because I don’t have teeth like theirs, and using a knife is a different skill. But I learned how prey works from them, how to track and move.”

It showed, even now as she walked beside him. Each of her steps were intentional and her eyes were sharp at whatever they looked at. Still, she was human, and that was obvious in how she walked too. In the way she stood tall with her shoulders pressed back and how she felt the cold, no fur to keep her warm.

“You want to ask how it happened, don’t you?”

Of course he did, he wanted to know many, many things about her.

“Yes,” he admitted, “but only if you want to tell me.”

“It’s funny,” she said, without humor, “I thought I’d forget how to be with people after so long.”

“But you didn’t,” he noted. Their first interaction had been stilted, but not awkward. They had shared food. It was the opposite of inhuman.

“No,” she agreed. “I just didn’t feel human for a while.”

He got the feeling that she wasn’t talking about just the wolves. As if to make up for the times her words had fallen on ears that could not comprehend them, she spoke in a gush.

“I jumped out the window. From the attic. That’s how I escaped when they were killing my parents and my brothers downstairs. I caught my sister, even though she’s taller, and we ran.”

She didn’t look at him as she recounted the events, her eyes still set ahead as they continued the walk to the inn, but there was a haunted lilt to her tone, and he would bet that what she saw in front of her was a different forest, a darker one.

“But we got separated in the dark and I couldn’t make myself stop running, even when I didn’t know where I was going. By the time I collapsed I was miles from home, and I was alone."

She did look at him then, and he offered her a smile, tight and meager as it was, even if she couldn’t see it. Maybe she’d be able to see his support in his eyes.

“How did your parents die?” She asked all of a sudden, all while he hoped he hadn’t made her uncomfortable.

“Well my father could still be alive for all I know,” he admitted, “never met him, and wouldn’t care to.” He cleared his throat. “My mother got ill and died when I was young, I don’t remember much of her if I’m honest.”

“Did she love you?”

His breath came short and shaking. “Yeah.” He remembered a low voice singing about honeycomb and the warmth of the fire at home. “Yeah she did.”

Arya nodded. “My father was stabbed in the back; his head was bashed against a wall. My mother had her throat cut and was dragged out into the cold.” She didn’t mention her brothers and he was glad of it; he didn’t want to think of little boys that looked like Arya being murdered in their beds. His heart felt heavy enough for her as it was.

“I know because I walked back home the next day. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And when I got there a pack of wolves was circling our little house. I thought that they…” He didn’t need a further explanation. “I’ve never been so mad, distraught really, so I screamed and ran at the nearest one.” She chuckled then, and it wasn’t totally empty. His own noise of amazement escaped.

“I know, was totally unarmed and this tall,” she indicated, holding a hand at the height of her nose. “And I tackled a wolf.” He studied the side of her face with rapt attention, bards and storytellers of the highest caliber would struggle to create a tale half as engaging as the one Arya was telling now. “It didn’t so much as growl at me. Licked the side of my face. They were there to protect my house, my brothers’ and father’s bodies. And when I started digging, they helped, like they knew what it was for.” She looked at him again, half sly, “I wasn’t so strong back then.”

“No, I bet you were.” For fucks sake, she had _tackled_ a wolf. Although that didn’t explain how she had lived unthreatened by the beasts. “But why didn’t they attack you?”

“They were pack. I was pack,” Arya said, simple. As if she wasn’t a member of a wholly different species.

“Family then?”

“No, pack isn’t just family,” she said, then struggled to elaborate, “It’s…pack.”

The inn was in view now, he could see Mable and Willow carrying in firewood, their laughter carried on the wind, even if the words they spoke were unintelligible.

He still didn’t quite grasp how she had gained the wolves’ trust and protection, but he understood some of it, how blood wasn’t the only thing that connected people. Or beings.

“Afternoon girls!” Arya called out, lifting up their catch in their air.

“Supper!” Mable yelled back with a hoot, nearly dropping her logs.

“That’s a big one,” Mable commented when they were close enough, the four of them going back inside and exhaling in relief at the warmth. Indeed the rabbit was larger than most of Gendry’s offerings. He hoped it represented the start of a trend of more bountiful catches. “Did you nab it Miss Arya? You’re better than Gendry.”

Gods she was cheeky, but he found himself laughing along with Arya and Willow anyway.

Arya began telling Mable how they had found the rabbit burrow, and it continued to amaze Gendry how every word out of her mouth managed to be engaging. Mable’s eyes were wide in rapture as Arya explained how she had leapt onto the creature.

They were crowded around the kitchen fire now, mindful to stay out of Jeyne’s way as she took the hare and set to work preparing it. 

“Did it really happen like that, Gendry?” Mable asked as she and Willow stacked the wood in the way Jeyne liked.

“Yep, you might be right about her being the better hunter.”

“Probably because I was raised by wolves,” she said, letting her voice get low and dark before snapping her teeth. Mable’s eyes, still big in her nine-year-old face, widened even more.

“Really?”

“I’ll tell you about it during dinner,” Arya said, and Mable dashed off with a light laugh.

“You’re good with the children, thank you,” Jeyne noted, looking up from skinning the rabbit for a moment.

“I had two younger brothers,” Arya said with a shrug. “It’s nice to see them all here safe and healthy. You do a good thing.”

Jeyne actually flushed under the praise, a look Gendry didn’t think he’d ever seen on her. “Well your help is appreciated,” she said with a nod to the hare. “if you care to help more, they should all be in the main room darning socks, or you could go up to your room and rest, you’ve done plenty for us today.”

“I’ll need a moment to get the feeling back in my fingers, and I’m not the best with needle and thread, but I’ll give it a go.” Arya ducked into the main room. Gendry lingered in the kitchen for a moment, knocking the last of the snow off his boots and savoring an extra moment by the fire.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Jeyne asked, just as he was about to follow Arya.

“Aye, I’m hungry. There’s enough there, yeah?”

Jeyne pushed past him to get the fire, hare’s entrails in a pan to fry up. “Yeah,” she said, “and good bones for soup.” She eyed him for a moment once the pan was set to sizzle. “Try to keep Miss Arya around yeah?”

He opened his mouth, intent to let her know that he had absolutely no control over that, but Jeyne’s eyebrows were already raised at him, and there was no arguing when he wanted her to stay longer too. For her company, he tried to convince himself, although he suspected already it was more than that.

The kids were quiet considering they were all in one room together, clustered around the long table. It took a moment for him to recognize Arya’s head among the throng, despite her being the center of it. Apparently, Mable couldn’t wait to be told the wolf story, and Arya was recounting it again for the children, a more animated and a tad less gruesome version than the one he had heard. It had the room engrossed and the sewing abandoned, the sole exception being Samara, whose mother and elder sister had both been proper seamstresses, and who has even stiches without having to look. The only other disturbance in the room was Ria, who hummed lightly as she bounced Nev in her lap.

“A wolf’s fur is the softest there is, better than any blanket,” she was saying. “And I always felt safe knowing they would protect me, because they’re smart creatures and they had decided that I belonged with them. We were a pack.”

“Then why’d you leave?” Asked Selma, she was holding Hana’s hand, her grip tight with that unknowing strength of a child.

“Well I grew up,” Arya said. “And I learned some things about myself and decided it was time to go off on my own so I could start the next part of my life.” Arya must have sounded very wise to them, because they were nodding along.

Gendry thought it wise too, she had the real spirit of a journeywoman, and a knowledge of herself that Gendry envied.

“I saw a wolf in the woods the other day,” Pen interrupted, “it looked very smart.”

“I bet it was,” Arya said, going on to describe the way of wolves, how they hunt and play and love with a rough abandon. Gendry should have been annoyed that she was adeptly undermining the lesson he had instilled in Pen and Jimmie earlier in the week, but the kids were all listening too eagerly for him to anger.

It became a night of stories; wolves in the forest turned to talk of wood sprites which inspired Ria to sing a song for them about flowering trees and a summers breeze. They got on the subject of tricky nymphs, and Ria was swearing that there were faces carved in the trees farther up north where she was from when Hana uttered something about the Lady. Jeyne interrupted with the meal before anyone else could make a comment. Arya had seemed only contemplative about Hana’s comment concerning the ‘selfish, tricky dead Lady.’

The hare was well cooked alongside the parsnips and it was a companionable evening, one that had Gendry craving a hearty ale, a desire that was easily overlooked by the fact that he had seen everyone smile at least once before Willow began making threats about bed time.

He knew it was as much a warning for him as for the children, and he began gathering his things for the short trek back to the forge. Before he could leave for the night, Arya caught his sleeve and tugged him close. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”

For a wild moment he thought she was going to kiss him goodnight. But that was silly. She just tapped her knuckles against the side of his hand before following the children upstairs. Despite that he couldn’t stop licking his lips on the way back to the forge.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took longer than expected, and the chapter count went up, but you know how it be sometimes.  
> (also, i know there was some last chapter, but tw for animal death, i feel its a tad more graphic this chapter if thats something that bothers you!)

Anxious little tugs picked at his heart and awoke him half an hour before the sun crossed the horizon the next day. He had relaxed some by the time Arya arrived, earlier even than the day before. Maybe she just wanted an excuse to tease him again, but he was dressed and ready. Her keen eyes didn’t sink when he answered her knock though, and he hoped that it meant she was anticipating spending time with him.

Their morning was devoid of the previous day’s tension and filled instead with an easy banter and a sun that almost seemed to warm his face when Gendry’s cheek was turned the right way. They caught three squirrels in the hour and a half they were hunting and spent another fifteen minutes shaking nuts off tree branches, ones Gendry wouldn’t have recognized without Arya. The success filled him like a deep breath, letting his shoulders relax and setting his spirits high.

He wasn’t the only one. The children had fun roasting the nuts over the fire in the main room. It was a pleasant distraction from their chores and only endeared Arya to them even more. She spent the middle of the day explaining tracking to Mable and Jimmie, teaching them about spotting split twigs and flattened earth.

“Oh, can we please come with you and Gendry tomorrow?” Jimmie asked, refusing to look at either him or Jeyne for permission.

He had asked once before, and Gendry had denied him outright. Mostly it had been because he was inexperienced himself and didn’t want to teach the boy wrong, but he had also figured that he preferred solitude in hunting as he did most things. After two days in Arya’s company, he was beginning to doubt that.

“I don’t see why not, so long as you have clothes warm enough.” Mable squealed and was already off to beg Hana to borrow her warmer cloak. Jimmie just fixed his eyes to Gendry, his mouth pressed closed in anticipation, causing Arya to look to him, an afterthought. “That’s fine, right?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and Jimmie beamed. At this point he was far enough accustomed to children’s whining and nagging to teach two of them for half a day. They might even have a laugh.

…

“Mable, if you don’t stop yappin’ you’re going to scare off all the game on this half o’ the continent.”

Mable huffed, was silent for three seconds, and started asking Arya questions again.

Jimmie looked like he was about to strangle her, and even Arya, who had started the morning off finding Mable’s persistence and excitement charming, sighed heavily before answering.

Teaching them how to set snares had been easy enough, they were attentive students, and encouraged by how easily the results were replicated. Now that they were tracking, with the skill not coming naturally to either of them, Jimmie had become frustrated, while Mable was eager to move on and find something she was good at.

“Why can’t you ever shut up!” Jimmie demanded. There was a ridge to their left that echoed his voice back. The silence in the wake of his yell was slicing. Mable was shaking, on the brink of a tantrum or tears.

“Asking questions is the best way to learn,” Arya said after a moment, it seemed she needed a pause to find her patience, and even then, a sliver of irritation shone through.

Jimmie heaved. “Well I didn’t ask you!” His eyes shifted to Gendry then, seeming to expect some kind of support. But Gendry had never been sympathetic to selfish outbursts.

“We’re going back,” he said. It was the end of the conversation. Gendry led the way, determined not to look over his shoulder to check on Jimmie and Mable. With the exception of someone’s muffled sniveling, they were quiet for the rest of the walk back. it would have been better if no one cried, but tears taught lessons.

It was the first time in days that there was nothing to show from their hunt, and even if Jeyne was excellent at rationing, and there was no threat to them going hungry quite yet, Gendry couldn’t help but feel a bit useless. The feeling only increased when Jimmie slammed the door closed behind him, his footsteps loud and exaggerated as they stomped across the kitchen and then up the stairs, tracking in snow and setting Jeyne’s brow in a deep furrow. It was only the small shake of Gendry’s head that saved him from a verbal lashing, it would be better to let him stew in his anger for a little longer.

Mable, whose energy had diminished at the fault of the silence during that walk back, seemed to recover and immediately started informing Samara of her morning’s proceedings, singing Arya’s praises and complaining about Jimmie all in one breath.

Jeyne sent him a look he didn’t have the mind to interpret and went back to stoking the kitchen fire. He turned to Arya instead, feeling how the questions she had kept quiet for the walk back were now threatening to bubble over.

“Sorry about that, Jimmie’s a little pest sometimes,” he said, knocking his boots against the doorframe to get the snow off. Arya pulled off her hat, making her hair stand up in odd uneven arches on top of her head for a moment before they fell forward. It was maddeningly endearing. Arya shrugged, blowing some of the loose strands out of her face.

“I think he’s just desperate for some male company. He wants to spend time with you.”

How had he never considered that? Gendry supposed he had the opposite problem growing up with three other apprentices around his age and a cranky old master. They had all been loons as kids, desperate for a mother and gawking at poor Mrs. Adleston when she delivered the produce every Monday and threw a few words their way.

“I’m not his father though.” He had always felt strongly about that, the same way that Jeyne did; they were resources for the kids, not replacements, and parental feelings like love and devotion were things that were all too easily taken away in the dead of winter.

“His father is dead,” Arya said, “And you act like one besides.” He blinked at that, both uncomfortable and warm at the notion. “It’s not a bad thing,” Arya continued, but Gendry didn’t know how he felt about her observances, so he walked into the main room, hoping to avoid them.

It worked well enough. Arya was still a novelty for the children, a spot of interest when everything else seemed to stay the same, and she was ambushed with comments and questions when she followed him. They used to treat him the same way before he became part of the woodwork, even when he was never as tolerant to their insistence. But unlike him, Arya actually was a passing curiosity. He needed to keep reminding himself of that, otherwise it wouldn’t just be the children who would become overly attached. A week, she had said, it had been four full days already. Maybe that was what Jeyne’s warning look had been for.

But it was easy to ignore Jeyne’s sharp looks. Almost as easy as purposefully overlooking the reality of the dwindling time he had left to pass with Arya.

When morning came the next day it was just the two of them again. He preferred it that way; they played off each other well, knowing when it was harmless to chat and when silence was necessary. When Arya beckoned for him to hand over his crossbow he didn’t question her. She used it to shoot a duck out over the frozen pond several miles west of the inn. It fell to the ice with a dull thud, about thirty feet from where they were crouched. She had much better aim than him.

“Nice shot,” he said, after Arya had relaxed her stance. “Can’t remember the last time I ate duck.”

There was a contemplative look on Arya’s face, a definite furrow to her brows. She shook it off before he could ask about it, standing to collect their catch. But before she stepped out onto the pond, she found a hefty rock and lobbed it onto the ice. It skittered over the surface but didn’t crack it. Walking on ice had unnerved him the first few times he had done it, but he hadn’t so much as second guessed it in years.

“It’ll definitely hold for a small thing like you,” he called out, and Arya turned to give him a playful glare while walking backwards onto the slippery surface with sure steps. When she made her way back to him, she presented the duck. It was a small male, underfed. There were no other sounds that suggested more fowl nearby, and Gendry couldn’t help but wonder how it had gotten separated from its flock.

“I remember the last time I ate duck. My sister was a good cook, the sauce she would put on it was sweet, and it made it taste…” Her sentence drifted along with her eyes, the look of her was more regretful than sad, but the sentiment underlying her words was clear. She talked about her sister like she was dead. Gendry’s skin prickled with the knowledge. He’d never missed anyone so much, the memory of his mother wasn’t strong enough for him to hold onto.

“You could suggest it to Jeyne, she’d probably be willing to give it a try. ‘Specially for a guest.”

Arya shook her head. “You need fruit for it, and there’s none of that. It wouldn’t be the same anyway.” Arya hummed to herself for a moment, before a thought seemed to startle her. “Not that whatever Jeyne makes won’t also be good.”

“Well, she’s made tree bark taste good, so you’re right about that,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. It worked, Arya guffawed and demanded elaboration. It was odd how he could admit now, with dinner in hand, that the times he had nearly starved were sort of funny.

Or maybe it was Arya that was funny, repeating ‘spruce bark’ under her breath with a laugh on her lips.

“Oh come on now, wolf girl, you’re telling me you’ve never ate anything odd?” He asked in an effort to keep her laughing.

“Lots of raw meat before I figured out it was making me sick,” she admitted, shaking her head at her prior stupidity. Just the thought of it turned Gendry’s stomach a bit. “I always cooked my portion of the kill after that, but that was hard because wolves don’t like fire. I ate lots of nuts.”

“How old were you?” He asked, incredulous, “that you just thought you could eat raw meat all of a sudden?”

“I just assumed if the wolves could do it so could I. But I really didn’t have the teeth for it, I’d have to chew for ages.”

He laughed then, the image of a younger Arya grumpily chewing on a bloody steak implanting itself in his brain. She smiled herself after a moment, almost bashful.

“What?” He asked. He’d feel bad if he had embarrassed her, but she just shook off the odd look on her face and replaced it with a contemplative tilt to her head.

“I was a bit stupid then, I suppose,” she said, measured.

Once he was reassured that she hadn’t been self-conscious after all, he agreed, which caused her to smack his arm in playful annoyance. He reached out to do the same, but Arya ducked his grip and set out in a sprint, the fastest he’d ever seen a person run through snow. There wasn’t a hope in catching up, but he made an effort anyway, at least managing to never lose sight of her. When she finally decided to spare him and catch her breath, the inn was just through the next glade. How odd, when the walk to the pond had been so long.

They stood still for a moment, catching breaths that misted even through the boundaries of their scarves. But then, from somewhere above them, came the twittering of a bird, and it reminded them to return to the shelter of the indoors.

The duck was tender that night, unadorned, yet tasty enough to have him licking his fingers twice. Arya beside him wouldn’t stop singing Jeyne’s praises, and not once did she comment about the possibility of a fruit sauce.

…

He awoke the next day with the desire to head north on their hunt once more, towards the caves Arya had wanted to avoid on their first day out. There was a persistent thought that she might be more amiable to his suggestion now. It nagged within his head as he went through the motions of preparing for the day, only to fade as the sun continued to rise higher without Arya knocking at his door.

Had it been a week already? Would she leave without saying goodbye? He counted the days out in his head, not quite a week yet, so then why hadn’t she come to collect him? He dawdled for far too long, and he could hear Arya condemning him for not leaving at first light. It had the opposite effect of what she probably would have him do. Instead of heading north as he had imagined, his feet took him towards the inn.

There was a mess of footprints by the backdoor, far more than had been there the day before. A question regarding the commotion was on his tongue as he prepared to shoulder his way inside. He had the door opened the width of a handspan before a shriek of “Stop!” put him dead in his tracks.

“What?” He called back through the crack in the door, clamping down on the spike of his heartbeat at the shriek and turning it into confusion.

“Oh, Gendry.” That sounded like Samara’s voice. “Go through the front door, it’s bath day!”

Oh, well why did no one tell _him_?

He shut the door firmly and stomped to the other side of the inn, entering to see most of the children sitting at the foot of the long table in a lopsided circle, entertaining themselves with a game of jacks. Only Hana and Selma were excluded, sitting on the hearth with their backs to the fire so that their hair might dry.

“Why are you here so early, Gendry?” Hana asked. It set him stumbling over an answer for a moment before just settling for the truth.

“I was wondering why Miss Arya hadn’t come to meet me for our hunt is all. Thought she might have left and wanted to check.”

“Nah,” said Selma, sucking on one of her wet locks of hair, “she was just helpin’ Jeyne set up the tub.”

That made sense, the tub was heavy and needed to be dragged over from the stables they used for storage, then filled with snow, melted, and heated. It took ages. Having another pair of strong hands would push the process along, so Jeyne probably diverged from the typical bi-monthly bath schedule while help was present.

“Jeyne gave her the first wash, even though the rest of us had to pull straws,” Hana added, “not fair.”

“But you both got the second one, so don’t be complaining,” he said. There was a lecture on the tip of his tongue about being grateful that Jeyne always washed last, when the water was dirty and cold. Only to be interrupted by Samara, freshly dressed and bathed, who wasted no time in shoving Selma aside so she’d have a seat at the hearth. Like the first gale of wind at the start of the storm, it set the two girls to pushing and slippery hair tugging and he had to intervene in the squabble before it ended with someone thrust into the fire. By the time he had finished cajoling Hana to sit between her sister and Samara and their tempers had cooled some, Arya had descended the stairs and was instantly pulled into the jacks game.

Her hair was clean and drying, the strands curling in opposition to one another so that it looked like there were waves crashing on her scalp in miniature, both rising and receding at once. There was a warm pink in her cheeks too, spread out more even than the blotchy color caused by the cold. She was dressed for a hunt, and he felt stupid to have worried so much.

It was only as she stumbled picking up four of the jacks, the ball rolling in his direction, that she looked up at him.

“Oh,” she said, standing up, “I thought you’d be out already. I was going to track you down.”

He felt caught somehow, a squirrel in a snare, confused and disoriented. Honesty seemed the only way to slip the knot.

“I thought you might have left.” He wondered if she could read the message underneath his words, the one that said he would have missed her. If she did, she gave no indication, just a tilt of her head and a tone of voice that suggested confusion.

“Why would I leave without saying goodbye?”

Like she didn’t believe such an action possible.

“I didn’t think you would, I just—” Wanted to see her. Wanted to spend time with her.

“Wanted a bath,” Selma said. Samara chuckled and pinched her nose in his direction. He was saved from admitting that he hadn’t even known it was bath day as the girls continued laughing in uproar.

“You do stink,” Arya said, with a familiar pat to his shoulder, standing close enough that he could tell she meant it in jest.

“Well you’ll have to wait your turn!” Willow called out with a hand full of jacks. And just like that his day was decided for him, his outer layer shed alongside Arya’s as they squeezed their way into the jacks circle.

After a few more rounds, with Willow found to be the definite winner, the jacks are replaced with cards. A valiant effort was made on Gendry’s part to teach them Rummy, but the kids didn’t have the patience to learn or remember the rules, so it was traded for Old Maid.

It was a carefree afternoon, the likes of which he hadn’t known in many months. The children remained in high spirits, a combination of the elation of bath day and the lack of chores. It was a day of games and light jokes and everyone taking too long in the bath despite Willow’s constant reminders to be fair when the latest occupant emerged with pruned fingertips and rosy cheeks. Until they all heard Nev’s giggles through the door when Ria was cleaning him up, and it put the rest of them in too bright a mood to complain about the long minutes spent waiting while others soaked.

Noon had long passed by the time Willow climbed into the tub. They’d need to eat soon, something easy because there wasn’t any preparation being done for a meal; maybe he’d offer to prepare dinner after dawdling all day, but even that could wait for later, the air of the room seemed hazy, like it was steamed with bath water, and it obscured any sense of urgency. Hana had fallen asleep on the long bench while Mable, Samara, Selma, and Arya all sat back to front and braided each other’s hair. Ria was humming a sweet tune as she embroidered a snowdrop into the corner of her apron and he felt warmer than he had in ages, even with the fire dwindling some. Just then Willow came out of the kitchen, her hair tied up so it wouldn’t drip down her back, and a spare sheet thrown over her shoulders to keep the warmth close.

“Your turn Gendry,” she said, settling down on the hearth next to Jimmie.

“What about Jeyne?” He asked, he could wait a little longer, there wasn’t any desire to leave the dining room really, not with it being as comfortable as it was. Except Jeyne wasn’t in the room with them. She hadn’t been all day—and he had noticed, but the thought had never snagged in his brain like it did now.

“She went for a lie down after we set up the tub,” Willow explained. “She said she wasn’t feeling well.” There was a note of fear in her voice, like there was when any of them were bed ridden. The memory of the good cheer she had when they were playing their games nagged at him now, with the thought that she had fabricated her mood.

Not wanting to cause undue upset, he went to take his bath. The water wasn’t hot, but it was warmer than the water in his basin back at the forge. After he had stripped and sank into the water, he couldn’t help but give himself a minute to soak, highly aware of the way the water felt smooth and delicate against his skin. With a sigh he put soap to his skin and scrubbed thoroughly, feeling sweat and dirt and dust peel off him. He dunked his head under the water when he was finished, and it was the first time he really felt a chill in the water, getting a bit of a shock as his ears went below the surface. He scrambled out of the water, his wet, too long hair falling in his eyes and the rest of him creating a slick puddle next to the tub. Even as he wicked himself dry, and cleaned up where he had dripped, he felt bad for Jeyne and the cold bathwater she would have to endure.

Unless he did something about it.

He dressed quickly, his clothes sticking awkwardly where he wasn’t quite dry, and grabbed a bucket before propping open the back door just a crack, as he began the process of shoveling the dirty water outside.

He had only just begun when there was a knock on the door from the dining room side. Rather than the badgering from Willow that he had expected, it was Arya’s voice that called out.

“Are you decent?”

“Aye.”

She stepped into the room, lingering near the doorframe with a furrowed brow as she watched him scoop out the dirty bathwater.

“What are you doing?” She asked after a moment. “Jeyne still hasn’t had a turn.”

“I know, I was doing it up fresh for her, she shouldn’t bathe in cold water if she isn’t feeling well. I know I’d hate to be woken for dirty bathwater.”

“Oh,” Arya said, then smiled as she grabbed an empty bucket and began to help him empty the tub, the dirty water thrown out the door. Once the tub was mostly empty, they reversed the process, bringing in bucketsful of clear snow. He regretted not drying his hair more thoroughly as the frigid air outside made it stiff on top his head.

Once it was suitably filled, they added fuel to the fire and sat on the bench, catching their breath and waiting for the snow to melt. He was thinking of what he could make for dinner without upsetting Jeyne’s carefully counted rations and messing up what was supposed to be a nice gesture. Probably something with the duck bones from yesterday and a potato or two. He scraped his thumb around the corner of his mouth, an effort to turn off the sudden onslaught of hunger.

“Want to help me with dinner?” He asked, turning his head to find her already looking at him. There was a searching look on her face. “What?”

“You know, you must have been very dirty. You’re paler than I thought.”

He scoffed, like his skin caught enough sun to warm in color. “And you’ve caught me on all my good days too. No soot from the forge.”

A quizzical expression grew on her face, as if she was trying to imagine it. He waited for her conclusion, but it never came, replaced with a shake of her head. “Well what’s for dinner then?”

Neither of them was a great cook, but with some input from Willow they were able to make a satisfactory soup, just finishing by the time the water in the tub was all melted and warm.

Hana had to be roused for the meal, and Jimmie and Pen wrangled from where they were playing upstairs, but once everyone was seated they ate with gusto.

“It’s really good, Miss Arya,” Mable said. More manners present in one meal than the previous two years, even with the smear on her lip. He was inclined to mention that he had helped with the meal, but he recognized a battle he couldn’t win when he saw one and let Mable continue in her pursuit of Arya’s affections.

“Thank you,” Arya said, “Although I had Gendry’s help.”

“But Gendry’s a dreadful cook,” Selma interjected, only to be swiftly elbowed by Hana. “But he is! Remember the first couple of weeks he was here Jeyne had him helping her in the kitchen, but he was so poor at it she set him off hunting everyday instead! I remember.”

She wasn’t wrong by a stretch, although in his own opinion he had improved considerably, and he had to bring his bowl to his lips to stifle a chuckle as Hana admonished Selma for her rudeness.

“Well then it must have been Willow’s suggestions that were so helpful,” Arya said, “because I’m a poor cook too.”

This comment seemed to sap the enthusiasm out of their small audience, who had Willow’s cooking all the time and didn’t find it exciting, and returned their focus to finishing their meal. Having already finished, Gendry leaned forward to continue talking to Arya.

“I thought the fried cardinal was quite acceptable actually, even if the portions were a little lacking.”

Arya smiled to herself, and he meant the comment to be more of a tease than a compliment, but he liked this outcome better. It was funny to remember that first afternoon they met now, how he had thought her strange and near mystical when he knew her now to be just a woman, and a friendly one at that.

“I was so annoyed I had to share,” Arya admitted. “I was the first thing I had eaten in…a while.” Her smile slipped away. “I wasn’t doing as well by myself as I thought I would be.”

“It’s hard to be by yourself.” He remembered his first few days outside his master’s forge, and even with enough coin and adequate supplies he had been nervous going to sleep every night on the road. A night breeze wasn’t the same as snoring from the other apprentices, and it must have been very different from the huffs and growls of wolves.

“That’s why it’s so nice being here,” Arya said, setting aside her empty bowl to cross her arms over the table and rest her cheek against them. Even with her head down she was able to look up at him intently. “I don’t think I realized how much I missed being around people, good people.” She offered him a tired little smile, one that was true, and for a wild moment he pictured asking her to stay. But his tongue curled in on itself.

It was then that Jeyne slipped downstairs for her bath, looking calm. She gave a quick wave of thanks to him and Arya, the only ones who seemed to have noticed her.

“She seems better,” Arya remarked.

“Was she in poor form this morning?”

“Tired, for sure,” Arya said. “And she was coughing a bit, but I couldn’t really tell otherwise.”

“And she didn’t say anything?”

Arya shook her head, the movement minute due to her position. “Just said she was going to bed once we had the tub set up.”

“Sounds like her.” Jeyne wasn’t one to voice her own discomfort. Her frustration was known to burst on occasion, but not any emotion that would worry Willow or the children. It wasn’t a practice he understood. “She shares a room with Willow and still won’t have her help most of the time.”

“She’s lucky to have your friendship then,” Arya said, raising her head, a funny red impression on her cheek. She looked mused and tired and sweet. “You’re too stubborn to let people refuse your help, aren’t you?”

She had phrased it like a question, but he knew it wasn’t one, especially as a grin grew on her face following his eye roll.

“Suppose so.”

“Good thing I’m the same way,” Arya said, and then got up and began going around to collect everyone’s bowls for washing before knocking on the kitchen door, knowing he couldn’t follow, as Jeyne granted her entrance. He wasn’t sure if it was a dismissal, but he found himself hanging back, wanting to confirm that they’d return to their hunt together tomorrow.

Either Arya wasn’t very good at cleaning up, or she wasn’t as thorough as Willow, because she emerged from the kitchen even before Jeyne was done soaking with drops of water still falling from her knuckles.

“All Jeyne had to say was that the water is nice,” Arya said as she approached him, wiping her hands dry on the hem of her shirt.

“What?” He asked, before the words caught up to his brain and he nodded. “Well at least she’s enjoying it.”

“Yeah, nothing better than a warm bath before bed.”

“It is getting rather late,” he said, and then, urging himself not to hesitate, “so I best be going. I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Aye, you will,” she answered, raising her hand in farewell.

He had to stoke the fire high in the forge for it even to approach the warmth the inn had that day.

…

True to her word, Arya knocked on the door to his forge bright and early the next morning.

“The cold feels a bit sharper today,” Arya said, taking a minute to warm up in the forge before they set out again. “But that might just because I was inside most of yesterday.”

“It was nice wasn’t it,” he said, “even normal bath days aren’t that nice.” He pretended to double check for both of his carving knives, but really only wanting to occupy his hands and eyes as he contemplated equating the warmth with her presence, the only factor that was different from the normal. But she began talking before he could make up his mind.

“Must be why all the kids had smiles after you left.”

“No,” he said. They left the forge, and he began walking them in the same direction they had started out on their first hunt together like he had wanted to do the day before. “That’s more likely because they’re still using their guest behavior around you. Most days they’re hellfires, the lot of them. Never seen Mable so polite before you came round.”

Arya hummed in contemplation. “That can’t be right. I’ve seen them all do chores. And Ria! Never seen a more responsible girl her age. They complain a bit, but all children do.” Arya nodded, confident in her assessment as Gendry bit back a laugh and shook his head.

“You’re right about Ria, but if you stay a bit longer, they’ll get used to you and return to their regular nonsense. Hana and Selma alone have had fights hot enough that winter was nearly scared right off.”

Arya went quiet, and it took him a moment of reflection to hear what he had said. Stay a bit longer. He hadn’t even thought to make the suggestion, yet it fell from a shelf in his mind and spilled past his lips without reproach. Arya seemed to be thinking hard about it, but when she spoke next the subject was changed.

“Are we headed towards those caves again?”

“Aye. Does that still bother you?”

Arya shook her head. “You were right the other day, about game being there, but there’s a den there too, and I didn’t want you finding it.”

“But it doesn’t matter now?”

“You know the truth about the wolves now,” she says with a nod, “And you could’ve hurt the wolf the other day and you didn’t.”

He would’ve, if Arya wasn’t there to stop him. It felt like lying not to tell her as much. “Only because you were there.”

Arya just shrugged. Did she trust him that much? That easily?

“Well I don’t mind teaching a lesson so long as the student is a quick learner.” By now they were coming up on a familiar deer path, and they’d probably need to be quieter in a moment, more attentive to the ground beneath them, but not quite yet. “You wouldn’t kill one now, would you?”

He had to admit that he wouldn’t, and he was glad Jeyne wasn’t near to hear the confession. His hand fell to the charm hanging off his belt and he wondered at his own sentimentality.

“They’re still dangerous,” he felt the need to add after a moment. To justify some sort of imbalance he was grappling with.

“Most animals are, one way or another.” Gendry thought of the bite of a bed bug, how the farrier that worked down the road in his childhood had been brained by a horse. It was a perspective he had never thought to take. “Besides, men are the most dangerous predators.”

A cloud covered the sun then, and Arya’s already grey eyes turned a shade darker. There was no argument to be had on that point, not with the weight of his crossbow on his back or the memory of the Lady and her cracked fingernails.

“Aye.”

Arya’s posture changed then, less slouched and more present. Her eyes took on their normal light despite the shade. The two of them were quiet then, focused on the path of them. They spotted deer tracks at the same time, fifteen odd minutes later.

“Look how small they are,” Arya muttered, as they crouched to inspect them closer.

“A doe and a fawn?”

“Has to be,” Arya said, even with one of her eyebrows dipped.

“Feels too early for fawns.” Arya nodded along to his appraisal. The snow from the last storm was mostly melted by now, but there was yet to be even the suggestion of fresh grass.

“Good for us though,” Arya said, not quite sounding convinced.

The tracks carried on down the deer path a considerable while, only occasionally dipping out to where the trees were more closely packed, and even then, never too far that they lost the route. Tracking was slow work, with both he and Arya careful not to let their steps be too loud on the ground. Twenty minutes or more passed, and Gendry doubted they had walked a full mile. It seemed they had been led on a cold trail when they came across droppings that were near frozen.

“Do you wanna continue on, or head back?” He asked, his sigh of frustration not masked. Arya fixed her hat and hood, fixing them more firmly on her head, and then held an arm out, indicating they’d march on.

They walked quicker now, were less careful in their gait and didn’t bother keeping quiet, expressing their frustration with the fruitless trail. Arya went on to exclaim on how it would be so much easier if they could just smell where there was game. That got a laugh out of him, one that tumbled from his throat before he glimpsed a buck, ahead of them and to his right, and he choked on the sound.

Arya’s head turned to him at the aborted noise, and he grabbed her upper arm to still her before raising a single finger to his mouth and pointing to where the animal had its head bent to a log covered in lichens. By some miracle it hadn’t heard them, or if it did, it hadn’t deemed them something worth dashing from. It would be a mistake.

The only other time Gendry had seen a buck that winter his hands had shook and his shot had missed. He had attempted to follow it for over an hour, but he hadn’t gotten a second chance. His hands didn’t shake now as he took his crossbow off his back with careful, quiet movements, loading the tiller as Arya’s hand rested on the back of his shoulder, the movement of her thumb serving as a reminder to take slow, even breaths.

Two steps forward, and then one to the left, and he had a clear shot.

“There’s a slight northerly wind,” Arya said, her voice softer than a breeze just behind his left ear. “Aim for the lungs.”

He let the bolt fly, and it struck the stag unaware. It let out a sound of distress and stumbled away in the closest approximation it could manage to a dash.

“That was brilliant!” Arya said once it was out of sight, her arms around his neck suddenly, her cheek pressed to his. His free arm wrapped around her waist immediately, and it was the only thing that stopped him from tumbling into her. She brought heat to his face, and he had to swallow to be rid of the tightness in his throat her praise caused. It was a long moment before she let go, but still too soon. “We’ll wait a little while and then follow the blood trail. It shouldn’t take too long to bleed out.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, putting away the crossbow with some remorse because he didn’t want to turn away from her. They talked about their luck, how long it had been since they had last seen a buck, and then about the fawn again and how there would be more soon. Perhaps the day was warmer, because even as they waited, he didn’t grow colder. He thought it more likely that it was Arya’s hug that still had his blood pumping.

After about a half hour they followed after the deer, the blood trail sharp red against the white remains of snow. It had only managed to make it about three quarters of a mile before it collapsed. He and Arya approached it slowly from behind, but it was obvious from its open eyes and the stillness of its chest that the buck was dead.

Arya and Gendry both released held breaths before they began the arduous process of field dressing. Neither of them was particularly practiced in it, wolves needn’t be so careful with their catches, and Gendry had only ever heard instructions, never done it in practice. Even with four hands between them, and both their knowledge, it was more work than he would have anticipated. Not least because of the deer’s size. It was only as its entrails slipped onto the forest floor as they turned the deer onto its side that Gendry realized they wouldn’t be able to carry everything back with them.

“I guess we leave those for your wolf friends? Don’t think we have anything to carry ‘em back with,” he said with his wrists balanced on his knees, careful not to wipe any of the blood on his pant legs. He hoped the blood would wash out of the leather gloves.

“Seems like we’ll have to,” Arya agreed. “Now please tell me you have some sturdy twine; we still need to hang and skin it.”

It was another twenty minutes before they were done, and much later in the day than he would usually spend out, but they had a lot to show for it. Together they were able to carry the hart back home.

…

There was a yell when they were in view of the inn, and then extra hands running out to help them and someone yelling Jeyne’s name as they made their way to the kitchen followed by the clattering of bowls being cleared off the main table.

He slipped in a quip to Jeyne about catching that buck she was always asking after, but he wasn’t sure if she heard it over Willow’s hoot and the claps she delivered to his and Arya’s backs both. She was laughing next to him, through Jimmie’s insistence that he stay as Jeyne carved up and cured the meat, and then through Jeyne’s pleased, if near disbelieving, mumbles.

They stayed in the kitchen, telling Jeyne about where they had made the kill, and about the other tracks they had seen, and she nodded with pleased eyes even as she coughed into her elbow and was more efficient with wrapping meat than any butcher he’d ever met.

Supper wasn’t until late that night, and it was near silent as they ate, everyone’s mouths too occupied with the meal. Ria organized everyone to wash up after Jeyne snuck upstairs for bed, and he went back into the kitchen to get the gloves he had left out to dry after a careful wash. Arya followed.

“I think I might stay a while longer,” she said, positioning herself in the entryway, arms crossed to keep warm. His eyes were fixated on her. “What with the weather being so bad.” It hadn’t snowed since the night she arrived, and if anything the days only seemed to be getting warmer. His heart soared with that knowledge.

“That’s a good idea,” he said, unable and unwanting to suppress his smile. Arya uncrossed her arms and relaxed her shoulders. The kids were behind him, splashing about, but he didn’t care a wick what they were saying or doing.

“So I’ll see you in the morning then,” she said with a smile to match his. It took his feet a long moment to decide to turn around and leave.

…

Perhaps after overhearing the conversation he and Arya had shared the day before, the kids deemed it time to revert back to their usual behavior, easily forgetting their guest courtesies. There wasn’t any need for he and Arya to go out after they were successful the day before, so instead he spent part of the morning digging up and resetting his traps by the stream now that the snow was mostly melted. By the time he made it to the inn for breakfast the usual squabbles resumed: a pigtail pulled one too many times, a chore only half completed, a shirt that really belonged to someone else. They were all impetus for scathing outbursts and long rations of hateful silence. There was a rhythm to it at least, familiar despite its annoyance.

“See?” He said to Arya over porridge, “Aren’t you so glad for their pleasant company?”

“Oh, they’re far from horrid,” Arya answered, even though she had someone else’s breakfast dripping off the end of her plait. Probably Nev or Selma’s, they were known for having grubby hands. “It’s just how children are. Weren’t you ever a hellraiser?”

“No.” He’d had a temper, sure, and still did, but he couldn’t remember ever throwing a tantrum. There was something to be said for stolid anger. “There were flames enough in the forge without my contribution.”

“Well I was. My older brothers always said I gave too much lip, and I’d break rules just because there were rules.”

“Explains why you fit right in, then.” She shoved his arm for that, a smile alight with indignation on her face. He knew she had more to say, but they were interrupted by Willow.

“If you’re not going out today, you can clean the kitchen. You know where the scrubs are, yeah Gendry?”

“Yeah,” he said, standing up. “And what’ll you be doin’?”

“Jeyne’s convinced we’re gonna be gettin’ more guests soon so we’re clearing up the stables, maybe see about the old garden patch behind it. The kids are getting the clothesline up and beating out the linens.”

There was a frenzy of movement in the next five minutes as boots and cloaks were put on. At the end of it, he and Arya were alone.

“Seems like they got the raw deal, cleaning the kitchen’s much better than the stables,” Arya said as he fetched the old scrubs from a low cupboard.

“You think that now,” he said, rolling up his sleeves, “but your knees will be aching within the hour.” Arya’s mouth pursed at that.

“But at least we aren’t outside.”

“At least we aren’t outside,” he agreed, and handed her a sudsy pail.

…

He was right about the sore knees, even if Arya was too stubborn to admit it. The floor turned out to be a lighter shade or brown than he was led to believe, and while it didn’t quite sparkle when they were done, there was a fresh gleam about it.

“How pissed off are we going to be when there’s mud tracked in here by tomorrow?” Arya asked as they sat on the cooking table for a breather before tackling the hearth and the cupboards.

“Considering we’ll be the ones tracking in the dirt, probably not a lot.”

“Oh, I’ll definitely be able to be pissed off at you,” Arya said, and he didn’t think before flicking the water on his wet hands at her face. She laughed, and dragged her palm, still sudsy, across his cheek. He held her wrist, tempted to hold her in place and splash more water, but that would just require more clean-up, so after a moment of holding her gaze he let go.

“I’ll get started on the fireplace then,” he said, putting some space between himself and Arya before he did something stupid. “You can scrub up the outside of the cupboards, it shouldn’t be too bad.” The hearth was the much harder job, with soot and ash settled into the brick. His shoulders and forearms ached, and he might have grumbled to himself even while he acknowledged that it would be good practice for when he finally got back to working in the forge.

Arya joined him after a short while, her job having been less intensive. They worked shoulder to shoulder, and he could see how the black ran up in streaks along her bare forearms to mirror his. How ground ash settled below her fingernails, and in the crevices between each finger. In low lighting she might have had the hands of a blacksmith.

“Does this remind you of the forge?” Arya asked following a harsh exhale through her nose. They were almost done.

“It should,” he said, what with the soot and the fireplace. “But my hands are all wet, and the fires not lit, so it doesn’t, really.” And Arya was beside him. She had never been in his forge like this, not when it was hot and running. “And you’re here so it’s—” Better. Different. Nicer.

He set his scrub to the side and curled his fingers to make them pop. She was so close when he turned his head to look at her. There was a smudge on her nose, the same color as her eyes which were so intent on him, and a freckle just above the hinge of her jaw that he hadn’t paid enough attention to before. He pressed his thumb against it as he leaned forward to kiss her.

She kissed him back, her lips soft and warm and sliding against his. It had been ages since he had kissed anyone, but it was simple with Arya, natural. Several minutes passed like that, at least, shallow breaths traded while heads and hands maneuvered carefully as they knelt by the fireplace. There wasn’t any shade of red that could match the color of Arya’s lips when she broke away.

“I like you an awful lot, Gendry,” she said as she sat back on her knees, fingers fretting at the neckline of her shirt, like she was holding back from pressing them to her lips. He hadn’t realized how much he was smiling until he opened his mouth to respond.

“Good, because I like you a lot too.” The confession came without him needing to think about it; words had never been so easy. She kissed his cheek when he situated himself next to her. He would have done the same if the smudge on her nose hadn’t travelled considerably to cover her cheek too. Part of her was tempted to tell her about it, but he liked the look of soot on her face too much to bother.

“We should get a fire going for when everyone else gets back inside,” Arya suggested, and a few minutes later it was crackling at their backs, warm and still growing as Arya reached for his hand and slotted their fingers together. They sat in silence, relaxing, until Jeyne and Willow burst back inside with relieved exhales.

“I always forget how bloody freezing it is out there,” Willow said, peeling off her hat and shooing them away from the fire so that she could hunch over it and pinch a healthy color back into her cheeks. Jeyne stood next to her, still shivering, and unwilling to remove even one layer of clothing.

“How’s the garden?” Gendry asked

“Well there’s nothing there, but I think the bulbs Jeyne planted back in autumn will sprout,” Willow supplied. “The stables are a mess though, totally drafty.”

“I could insulate it, did a good enough job with the forge. Would just need some good lumber.”

Willow waved off his suggestion. “Save it for a warmer day.”

“Looks great in here, by the way, thank you,” Jeyne said, finally peeling off her gloves and scarf. “The kids aren’t asking for supper yet, are they?”

“Did they come in? I didn’t hear them.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going deaf Gendry, you’re too young for that,” Willow scoffed, while Jeyne just narrowed her eyes at him and turned to Arya.

“You can wash up a bit if you want. Guess the fireplace was a real mess, thanks again.”

“Huh? Oh,” Arya said when Jeyne pointed to her cheek. She scrubbed away just about all the dirt he had left on her face with her sleeve, then knocked his shoulder with her knuckles. “Thanks for telling me about that.”

“Looked good on you.” He shrugged. Willow made a choking coughing sound he chose to ignore, looking instead to the opening door where Samara poked her head inside.

“Are we eating soon?” It always amazed him how Jeyne could predict behavior like that.

“In an hour,” Jeyne said, waving them all away as she put on her apron.

The kids were all in the main room, their cloaks and boots and gloves strewn about as they crowded around the fire. Willow snapped at them to clean up and then there was scurrying up and down the stairs and calls for someone to _please make the fire hotter_ and Gendry wished that the din would quiet down for a moment so that he could think. Preferably about Arya. Or talk to her, rather. As she couldn’t leave his thoughts at all. Even while he stacked logs onto the fire, he was aware of her moving about the room behind, pushing the table back into its proper place.

Then someone was calling for Ria to sing, and it became a chorus of insistence. Even Nev, wordless, tugged on her skirt with excitement. Defenseless against their pressure her voice grew wings, starting with all the inn favorites: a sailor’s song of adventure, a hymn with the lyrics switched to turn it bawdy, the annoying yet unforgettable round that they were all drawn into singing along.

“Can you do something romantic?” Samara demanded through the mask of a question as the rest of them caught their breath. “And not anything with a sad ending either.”

Ria was pink in the face from all the attention, even though it was obvious she enjoyed it. “Have I ever done ‘The Everlasting Tree’ for you?” Shakes from heads around the room had Ria settling her frame against the wall for a moment, fingers tapping against her skirt as she reminded herself of the rhythm, before she stood at her full height again.

The song started with a hum, sweet and deep with the magic lilt of her voice that needed no accompaniment. Gendry settled deeper into his seat on the bench, his arm now brushing Arya’s. Ria sang.

“ _There was a Tree, not far from hear, but off the beaten path_  
 _that blossomed in both dark and day, despite the winter’s wrath._  
 _‘Why do you grow?’ the Sun did ask, as the days grew shorter._  
 _‘I’m the one beauty,’ it said, ‘among the brick and mortar._  
 _Where else will the maidens go to yearn, where will widows grieve?_  
 _I must stand here, tall and firm, until we reach spring’s eve.’_

_‘You will die!’ The Sun exclaimed, ‘My rays cannot keep you fresh.’_   
_‘I don’t fear death,’ answered the Tree, ‘for wood is sturdy flesh.’_   
_A noble path this Tree did take, among the winds and snow,_   
_And one day it was blessed to meet a young girl and her beau._   
_A stark pair they made side by side, one pale, the other brown_   
_the boy in clothes that did not fit, the girl tied in a gown._

_‘Hold me here,’ she said to him, on a night without the moon._   
_They laid down in the Tree’s roots, a tea and tablespoon._   
_‘What tragedy?’ questioned the Tree, ‘did force them to this wild?_   
_Was it the clash of class degrees, or a forbidden child?’_   
_There was no sleep to be had, just whispers and soft kisses._   
_‘Let’s stay here,’ said the boy, ‘in this world where you’re my missus.’_

_‘It would be so grand,’ the girl sighed, ‘if we could marry here.’_  
 _‘Let’s,’ said the boy, taking her hands, ‘with this tree to overhear.’_  
 _The leaves of the Tree did tremble with sentimental joy_  
 _that it alone bore witness to union of girl and boy._  
 _‘See!’ Cried the Tree as the two swore loving affirmations._  
 _‘What cheer came beneath my boughs due to steadfast preservations!’_ ”

There was encouraging applause as Ria finished the ballad, cut shorter than was deserved when Jeyne entered with dinner. Gendry got a bowl of stew for himself and Arya after the children had gotten their portions. She mumbled her thanks as he handed it over, but seemed rather taken in private thoughts.

“What’s on your mind then?”

“Oh,” Arya said, “just Ria’s last song. I’ve never heard that one.”

“Aye, neither have I. I figured by now I knew all her songs, but every so often she pulls another one out of her sleeve.”

“My sister would love it,” Arya said. “She was a true romantic.”

“Ah. And I suppose you’re not?”

“Never gave it much thought to be honest. There always seemed to be better outlets for my energy.” She brought the bowl to her lips. “The song was sweet, but it didn’t resolve anything really. The tree might be fulfilled, but that boy and girl would have to leave it eventually, return to their real lives.”

Gendry thought as he ate, trying to think up some satisfactory response to her observation, but before he could think of anything Arya set her bowl down and continued. “But I guess there’s nothing wrong with making the most of something while you have it.” She tugged the ends of her own hair between two fingers and bit her lip. It brought a flush to his chest remembering how he had done the same thing earlier. He finished his stew.

“I never pay much attention to the words,” he admitted. “I just like listening to Ria’s voice. It’s nice to see the way singing for us makes her happy.” Arya set her bowl down mid sip.

“I never thought about songs like that,” she said. “But that’s a good way of thinking of them.” He intended to ask her to elaborate, but he heard his name in the conversation happening to his left and it stole his attention.

“I think Gendry should do the washing up!”

“Do you know how much washing I did today?” He shot back, looking between Mable and Pen who seemed the main proponents of handing off chores.

“Well we were outside!” Mable said, eyes wide in faux innocence. “And my fingers are still stiff!”

“Warm water should get them sorted out then,” he said, trying not to make his smirk too self-satisfied.

“Gendry!” Pen begged, and it was never a good idea to let any of them brush off work or they’d make a habit of it, but Pen had a soft look on his face only a heartless man could ignore, and he felt his steadfastness slipping.

“I’ll _help_ ,” he said, “but don’t think you’re handing it all off on me.”

With a breath of relief, Mable swept him up along with the empty bowls and, with Pen, they were set to scrubbing in the kitchen. True to his word he did little to help, taking on the job of drying, even when he was tempted to step in because the two of them were terribly inefficient and taking forever. Until at last he dismissed himself, collecting his outerwear and intending to find Arya. So they could talk, or kiss goodnight, or something.

“I’m heading out,” he said to Willow, eyes peeled for Arya. His spirits fell when she wasn’t in the main room. It seemed far too early for bed and that knowledge had him lingering for as long as he could while also avoiding the children’s pestering.

Half convinced he should just go upstairs and find her for himself, but not quite brave enough, he turned to the door frame, only to feel a hand on his elbow. Without even having to look he knew it was Arya’s, he had memorized every one of her touches.

“You’re leaving? I’ll come with you.” She was already dressed for the outdoors, that was what had taken her so long. Her eyes were warm and intent on him. He’d be denying her nothing tonight.

“Yeah?”

Her dimples didn’t always show when she smiled, but they did now. “I need a whetstone. I figure you have one?”

Gendry didn’t believe for a moment that she didn’t have her own. But he said nothing about it, just held open the door for her. She caught his hand as he followed her out and held it for the entire walk back to the forge.

It was too dark to see her proper when they arrived, even with her standing pressed into his side.

“Help me stoke the fire,” he said in a single breath. She was facing him now, her silhouette more pronounced, but still far too dark.

“Gendry…” Her hand was gripping his arm, just below his shoulder, like she meant to keep him in place. As if he could run when he felt her breath at the corner of his mouth or when her lips pressed to his.

It was a soft kiss, light as a feather on the wind, for all that Arya was filled with fierce determination in gracing him with it. He tilted his head to kiss her again, better, a strand of her hair between two of his fingers.

“I still think we should light the fire,” he said, after pulling away when he needed to breathe.

“Gendry,” she said again, half pleading, but he tugged her towards the fireplace anyway.

“I want to see you,” he said after a moment of daring himself to confront what they were doing. “I want you to see me too. Is that so bad?”

It would feel more real then, he was sure. And give him a moment to settle himself before they kissed again.

It was habit that guided him to start the fire, his mind entirely elsewhere. His hands were steady, even with intruding thoughts telling him he should be more nervous. He wanted to be with her, whatever that meant, and from the way Arya was resting her hand on the small of his back he was sure she wanted it too. Her hand rose over the path of his spine as he leaned forward to blow gently on the spark he created. His breath shook at the feeling of her fingertips running over his scalp. It was not his most well-built fire, but it was warm and would not die too quickly. Even if its light was nothing compared to the mirror of flickering flames caught in Arya’s pupils, dilated wide.

“What beautiful eyes you have,” he breathed. His hand cupped her face, thumb stroking the curve of her cheekbone. He wanted to tell her more, about the sweet curve of her ear, and how the way she smiled could make any moment more pleasing, but her arms were already around his neck, lips warm and sweet against his own. Her body was so present against his, wordlessly encouraging him to stand up before pressing him to sit onto his cot. He heard the thud of her boots as they fell onto the ground before being thoroughly distracted by the dig of her fingertips into his shoulders.

Arya settled herself on his lap without hesitation. Her weight was so nice. The way she bit her lip so alluring; he wanted those lips everywhere on his skin. He turned his neck, exposing himself to her mouth, eager to be bitten.

She covered him in kisses, soft little things that traced up his jaw and over the bridge of his nose before running over his neck with the tiniest of nips. When she finally returned to his lips, he felt like there was a flame flickering under his skin, making him tense and jerk like a log cracking from the heat.

His own hands untucked the two layers of her shirt from her breeches to touch her bare skin at the small of her back, and her sides, and the soft place just below her navel that pebbled and tensed underneath his thumbs. It made her shiver on top of him when he pressed just above her hip bones, and that felt unspeakably delightful.

She urged him further onto his cot, until his head could rest firmly on his pillow, Arya hovering over him, the only way she could really fit. They traded kisses on lips and necks and collarbones until he felt so warm it might as well have been summer. Their sighs and breaths filled the forge like a woodland lullaby.

“Can I stay here tonight?” She asked, when the grip of comfort called them both to sleep.

“Of course,” he said, then repeated himself, afraid he had spoken too softly against her hair. With one arm around her stomach he shifted her to lie beside him, her head next to his. It was a tight fit, one of his legs tucked between hers and her back flush to his chest. But all his limbs felt loose, and it was easy to find comfort with Arya so close.

“Might stay here with you more,” she said, taking his hand so she could kiss the back of it. His heart seemed to beat faster than it had even when she was kissing him on the mouth.

“I’d like that a lot.” Arya hummed and released his hand. Part of him was tempted to ask her to hold it again, he was positive he could fall asleep like that, but as soon as the thought came to mind it was chased away by the edges of dreams. They could fall asleep like that tomorrow, if they wanted.

…

He awoke to a pattering, consistent but not loud, and it took him a moment to understand that rain was falling on his roof. Arya was curled into herself with her back against his chest, her stomach expanding and contracting under his palm in slow, even breaths. He liked the thought that she rested well with him near, but excitement was running through him and he wanted to share it with her.

“Arya,” he said gently to the back of her head, his hand moving from its place against her stomach to cup her shoulder and give it a gentle squeeze. She woke easily and turned to look at him, musing her hair even more.

“Listen,” he breathed, and she did, her mouth falling into a gentle oh as she reached the same conclusion that he had.

With a jolt she sprung off his bed, shoving her feet into her boots before passing over his. They threw on their cloaks and tied them too loosely before emerging from the forge together.

The rain was cold, and it created a mist that clung low to the ground. It only added to the grey that hung in the sky, making all the world look dreary and miserable. But it wasn’t fucking snow. His face split in a grin.

The rain bit where it landed on his carelessly bare hands, but he didn’t care. Just turned his palms up to feel it. Arya’s face was turned skyward. She flinched when droplets fell on her eyelids, but it didn’t stop her from laughing after a short moment. “Rain,” she said, wonder spilling out of the word.

“Rain,” he agreed, then leaned down to kiss her with frigid water painting their cheeks. She laughed into his mouth, her hands fisting his cloak at his collarbone. He had never tasted water as sweet as that which slipped down the curve of her nose to land on his lips.

“I bet those kids are going crazy,” she said when they parted. “Let’s go see, yeah?”

She was right, of course. The kids were shrieking and could be heard far before they were seen. All of them had hair plastered to their foreheads and didn’t seem to care for the cold. It surprised him to see Jeyne outside with them, jumping into puddles with Nev and Pen as Ria, Selma, and Samara held hands and turned around in dizzying circles. Hana was doing cartwheels and skillfully managed to not get tripped up in her skirts while Jimmie and Mable tried unsuccessfully to imitate her, neither of them minding the mud on their pant legs.

“It’s not snowing!” Jeyne called out when she spotted them. She was breathless with joy. Gendry had never seen her like this.

“Where’s Willow?” Arya asked, letting go of his hand when Pen made to throw a handful of water in her direction.

“Now that’s not nice!” Jeyne said, stooping to tickle Pen’s sides and sufficiently distracting him from starting a water fight before turning to Arya. “She’s making soup, bless her.”

“Soup sounds good,” Arya remarked, grabbing Gendry’s hand again and dragging him towards the kitchen door. When they entered Willow took one look at them and started giggling madly into her hand.

“Sorry,” she said, collecting herself, “It’s just uh—” Her eyes shifted wildly for a moment. “Your hair looks silly.” She pressed her lips together, only barely managing to suppress another snicker. Her little lie saved him and Arya some embarrassment, so he didn’t call her out on it, although he doubted he’d be able to escape her questions or Jeyne’s looks later.

“Yes, well the weather is right dreadful,” he said, letting go of Arya’s hand and moving to stand by the warm fire.

“Aye, but it’s not snow.”

“Exactly what I thought,” he answered.

“Do you need any help?” Arya offered, but Willow just shook her head and shooed them into the other room to stand by the fire and dry off. They sat themselves on the hearth, the heat only making them more aware of how their cloaks and hair stuck to their skin. In silent agreement they shed their outer layers and set them to dry before extending numb fingers towards the licking flames.

“This reminds me of my first night here, a bit,” Arya said after a minute.

“Rain instead of snow though.” Maybe that was indicative of the great change that had been undertaken in the past few days. Had it been less than two weeks since Arya had first arrived at the inn with a swell of wind? Seasons seemed to have shifted since then.

“I don’t even remember the last time I saw rain.”

“I do,” he admitted. “Got caught in it setting snares. Everything was a muddy mess and I was raging mad.” He could still feel the wet silt through his fingers, knots impossible to construct, and curses streaming from his mouth as water blinded him. “Thought I’d never want to see rain again.”

“I thought the same thing about snow on my way to get here. Kept cursing the stuff, wishing I could see better.”

Gendry was confused by the statement. Did she mean that they might miss winter, after a few years? It seemed too odd a sentiment. “What do you mean?”

“I was agreeing with you, sometimes things aren’t as bad as they first seem.”

He tilted his head and was about to remind her about frostbite and pneumonia before she cut him off.

“Or that good things can come out of the bad things. I wouldn’t have met any of you otherwise.”

There was no arguing with her on that. After all, those snares he had set in the downpour had caught two gophers and a hare, which they had relied upon during the first blizzard of winter. He told her that story, her head tilted and her face attentive all the while, then about his first snowfall, how he couldn’t tell at first if his trembles were due to shivers or excitement.

“I was born during winter,” Arya said when he was finished. “Course I was so little I don’t remember it, but my father said it was the worst one he had ever lived through, so he always knew I’d be a fierce, strong girl.”

Gentleness came over her face at the memory, and he was glad that grief wasn’t still fresh in her.

“Proved him right, then.” The memory of her catching the hare with just her knife and skill made his throat feel tight.

“I think he’d be proud of me now. Proud of where I am.” She blushed then, as if ashamed to admit it. “Makes me feel good.”

“Good,” he said, purposefully firm in the declaration, not wanting her to have any space for further doubt. She picked at her nail in a place where it was torn.

“I just know there were times when he wouldn’t have been. When I wasn’t doing my best, for myself or others.” It took him a moment to remember her words from a week ago, about once having goals similar to her mother. She was looking at him now with her head still bowed, eyes inspecting from under her lashes.

He opened his mouth, unsure what question would bring actual clarification. He was curious, sure, but he cared more for who Arya was now than whoever she had been. “That’s in the past, yeah?”

She nodded, bit off the part of her nail that was snagging.

The kids began trickling back inside a few minutes later, some of them holding cups of half-cooked soup for something to warm their hands and lips. The lot of them looked like half-drowned cats, albeit with much better spirits. Except for Jeyne, who couldn’t seem to stop sniveling.

“It’s clearing up a bit,” said Hana, “the rain stopped.”

A quick glance through the slats of the door proved her right and he turned back to Arya as he came to collect his cloak.

“I’m gonna head out real quick to check the snares, if you want to come along?”

“Course,” she said, clearing her spot on the hearth to open up space for the wet ones.

Clouds still peppered the sky, but they didn’t blanket it in grey like they had when he and Arya left the forge. In congruence with the smell of rain lingering in the dirt and air, it felt like a whole new day. It was the first mild day of spring, officially, and it amazed Gendry that he could take without suffering a sting in his nose; even if he had remembered to bring his scarf from the forge, he would have forgone it.

“Hardly recognize the place,” he said as he led the way through trees he’d seen near everyday for the past three years. The statement was especially true when they came across the stream, absolutely gushing with rainwater. It was a sound he hadn’t knew he’d forgotten. They took a moment to watch the flow of water before moving to check the traps.

“Got a squirrel,” he yelled to Arya after finding it in the second snare and killing it quickly. She rose from her crouch down the bank.

“We’re gonna have to split that too?”

“Yeah. With ten more people too, actually.”

Arya shook her head in mock grievance. “A crime that is. You’re a right thief, you know that?”

He laughed on their walk back, the rest of the traps empty. “I wouldn’t consider myself so, no. Actually, I remember you being the thief that first day.”

“Perhaps.” Arya waved off the accusation, then rushed on. “But you were so clearly enraptured by my charms that it didn’t matter.”

He huffed. “More like enraptured by my hunger.”

“Oh really?” Arya said, and something in her tone suggested he was in for it. “Then what’s changed? You seemed quite taken by my charms last night.”

She was right of course. He had been. Utterly captured. There might not be a clear moment in his mind that he could hold as when he started thinking of her as more than another of the inn’s guests, but he could try. “I suppose I know you better now, yeah? You’re so willing to help with anything, and you’re so easy to talk to.” Yes, that was true, but there was more to parse out. “I like that you trust me. That you trusted me so easily.” And then, because he’d be remiss if he didn’t say it, “And you’re very beautiful.”

Blatant shock shaped the space around her mouth, like she hadn’t been expecting him to answer. He liked surprising her.

“You’re gonna say all that and not kiss me?”

He always would, if she was asking. There was a dead squirrel on his shoulder when he leaned down to kiss her and still it was perfect. The smile it caused to curve on Arya’s lips lasted the entire walk back, up until they walked into the main room.

Total silence. All the kids sat on the table benches or in front of the fire, but not one of them was saying a peep, even Nev and his normal babbles were nonexistent.

“What is it?” Gendry asked, his teeth on edge. The kids all looked to Hana whose leg was bouncing erratically.

“Jeyne…collapsed,” she said, after a pause that Gendry thought was held too long. “She was shaking so bad and then she just fell. Willow carried her upstairs. I think she’s sick.”

His jaw was locked no longer, but his heart was galloping in his chest. Even the ends of his hair were tense with nerves. He was halfway to the staircase before he turned back to Arya, urging with a look for her to mind the children, distract them to a level of normalcy if she could. She nodded and shooed him on.

He had only been inside Jeyne and Willow’s room once. When it had still been their mother’s room and there had been a corpse in the bed. He knocked before he entered, but did not wait for an answer.

Willow sat at the edge of the bed, brushing hair from Jeyne’s flushed face, the only part of her visible underneath three tucked layers. It turned his stomach to see someone so red in the face look so pale at the same time.

“What happened?” He whispered, something about Jeyne’s fragile state compelling him to be quiet when his heart was demanding he be loud. “She was fine this morning.”

“I don’t know,” Willow said, and it was only then that he noticed she was crying, fat tears stuck in her eyes and on the bridge of her top lip.

“Hey, hey,” he said, kneeling next to the bed, his hand settling on the center of her back and stroking gently. “She’s just a bit ill, but we’ll make her better, yeah?”

Willow didn’t look at him. “But Jeyne doesn’t _get_ sick!”

Jeyne groaned then, maybe at the mention of her name. So she was responsive at least. Gendry reached his free hand up to rest against her forehead. Her skin was sweaty, warm, but cooling quickly.

“She just has a fever,” he said. It was a lie, technically. She definitely had a fever, but he had no idea if there was some other ailment causing it. Something worse. He shouldn’t lie to Willow, out of everyone, he should be most truthful with her right now, but the words kept coming despite his reservations. “It’ll be sorted out in a few days.”

Willow took a deep breath she wasn’t prepared for, gasping over it twice.

“I’m going to get a pail and a cloth; she’ll need lots of water.”

When he returned Willow hadn’t moved an inch, but Jeyne was on her side, facing away from the door as she coughed from deep in her chest.

“I just want to sleep,” she groaned grabbing at the blankets and shifting in discomfort. He tried to hum gently but recognized that he was not really built to be soothing.

“I know she was cold earlier,” he said to Willow when his attempts were fruitless, “but I think she has to sweat it out.” He wringed out the towel and set it on her forehead. Jeyne grimaced but didn’t swat it away and didn’t complain as Willow tugged off the blankets. They forced her to drink several cups of water until she forced her mouth closed in petulance.

An hour passed before Jeyne seemed to reach a steady, if not peaceful, sleep. He and Willow sat on the floor, and all Gendry could focus on was how the morning had started off on such a bright note. The thought was a reminder that he should check on Arya and the children, reassure them that things would be alright. When he went to stand, Willow caught his wrist.

“Gendry, what if—”

“Shh.” Sharp, but careful to be kind. “Come on now, we both know your sister is too strong for a case of the sniffles.”

Willow didn’t laugh, but her lips twitched in an approximation of a smile, and that was enough for him. “I’m going to let everyone know what’s going on. You change the compress on her head when it stops being cool, okay?”

Downstairs the children had dispersed, and it was just Arya sitting on the table, the bench beneath her boots.

“Well?”

“She has a nasty fever. Willow is terrified,” he sighed, “But I think it’ll pass.”

“Good,” Arya said with no doubt. It was reassuring.

“You got them all to bed?”

“I doubt there will be sleep to be had, but they were confused enough to follow orders. They all got a terrible fright.”

“Me too honestly.” Arya stroked his back, her eyes patient. “I should stay here tonight,” he sighed, “keep an eye on Jeyne and make sure Willow sleeps some.”  
“Stay in my room. I won’t mind if you get up during the night.” She was offering as a comfort to him and he smiled in gratefulness. Under normal circumstances he thought the inn’s rooms too drafty, but he figured with Arya there he’d be warm enough.

…

Morning came, but it did not relieve him of his sleepiness. The inn’s bed was admittedly more comfortable than his cot, but it was no competitor against his nerves. Four times he got up in the night, the first he had to drag Willow out of her sister’s sickbed, but she had refused to leave the room and slept in the uncomfortable chair instead. The following two times Willow had slept, and he had changed the compress on Jeyne’s forehead. During his final visit of the night, Jeyne had been awake, complaining in a fashion he had thought her incapable of. His patience wasn’t quite long enough for it, and it was only through gnawing at the inside of his cheek that he stopped himself from making demands of her.

The children were already up and eager for breakfast and news when he came downstairs, and it was lucky that they accepted the cool soup from the night before and the same assurances that he had given Willow. What they did for the rest of the day he couldn’t say; one sick person in the building gave everything the feeling of a fever dream. He had Arya to thank most likely. She stopped in a few times when he was in the kitchen trying to make up a bone broth for Jeyne and offered him pats on the back and updates on the kids and swift kisses to his cheek. They pushed him forward when he wanted to fall asleep on the kitchen’s hearth.

Jeyne drank the broth, and more water, and seemed to be sweating less. She didn’t get any warmer during the morning, and he clung to that positive sign like it was the last of a boat’s rigging during a gale.

He encouraged Willow to leave the room in the early afternoon. She was only gone long enough to take a lap around the inn win a round of jacks, but she was calmer when she reclaimed her seat and that was all he could ask for.

He came back upstairs after updating Arya when the sun was near the horizon to find Jeyne sitting up in bed, hair a mess, and dutifully finishing her bowl of broth. Willow was sitting on the edge of the bed, hands eagerly tugging at her skirts.

“Your fever broke?” He asked and got Willow’s avid nod in response.

“You’re all so dramatic,” Jeyne croaked. “I wasn’t dying, barely ill.”

“Well better safe than sorry,” Willow bit back, reaching over to turn and fluff Jeyne’s pillow. “Do you want new sheets? You do, I’ll grab some and Gendry can get you to sit in the chair for just a min.”

Willow dashed from the room and he did as instructed. “How are you really feeling?”

“Tired, kind of dizzy. Is there dinner yet?” He eased her back into the chair.

“Just about, Arya is cooking. I’ll bring you up a portion.”

“Bless her.”

Willow came back in and promptly began to strip the bed. Her spirits revived enough to tell Jeyne off for scaring her like that.

“I can’t help being ill,” Jeyne groaned, she couldn’t manage an eyeroll, but the message was clear with how she tilted her head back. The sisters hugged tight before Jeyne climbed back into bed and Willow began combing her hair. Gendry made a discreet exit.

He spent dinner reassuring the kids that Jeyne was fine, but that didn’t mean they could bother her. Only after persistent begging did he allow them to march upstairs to deliver her dinner, with strict instructions to turn right around.

“I could sleep for an age,” he said, when it was just him and Arya.

“It has been a long day, and you were taking care of Willow and Jeyne both.” She smiled all soft and took his hand “And it was worth it because now we know everyone’s healthy.”

“Aye.” And then, because there was no helping it, he leaned over to kiss her forehead. “Thanks for all your help with the kids, and dinner.”

“No need to thank me. Honestly,” she added when he opened his mouth to protest. “I was helping you look out for your family, it’s the right thing to do.”

“I’m still going to thank you,” he said, and when Willow came down with the children she did too, hugging Arya so hard she lifted her off the ground for a moment.

“You both can go off to bed if you want. Jeyne’s asleep now and I think some washing up will be good for me, clean my mind too, you know?” Willow had a healthier look in her face, and she stood with assurance, but still he hesitated.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! She’s convinced she’ll be totally back to form tomorrow; you go out and collect dinner for us tomorrow like usual, you hear?” With a strict point alongside her parting remark she slipped into the kitchen.

“I’ll come back with you,” Arya said before he could even suggest it himself. It brought a relief he hadn’t even known he was hoping for. They set out with slow steps. It was a clear evening, less warm than the day before, but still with that inkling of spring in the air.

“Do you think she’s really all better now?” Arya asked, quiet concern lacing her voice.

“She will be within the week, even if she’s exaggerating now. She yelled at Willow and I for being dramatic about the illness, and I suppose she was right there, but when Hana said she collapsed…”

“You thought the worst. And Willow was just concerned for her sister.”

“Aye. I’ve never seen Jeyne ill, not even with a head cold. And of course Willow was reminded of their mother, even if she wasn’t saying anything about it.” Not wanting to open up horrible notions for his own mind to explore he changed the topic. “How were the kids today, I wasn’t paying enough attention, truly.”

“Perfectly understandable. And they were on edge, even Hana and Jimmie who were pretending they weren’t. They got a shock yesterday. I just tried to be calm for them.” They were at the forge then, sitting side-by-side as they unlaced their boots. “Tried to be calm for you too.”

“I appreciate it.” He sunk forward to kiss her, enjoying how it brought him comfort, how her fingers felt against his scalp. It was a long couple of minutes before Arya pulled away, and he didn’t want her to, half hard with an aching in his chest.

“You’re tired,” she remined him and her both. He was. He meant to sleep. Really. But his mind was active where his body was tired, and the tightness he had been carrying in his shoulders all day was not helped by the stiff cot. He shifted restlessly for what must have been a least an hour, further annoyed by how he must have been disrupting Arya.

At one point she turned to face him, and he was sure she was going to tell him to just be still. Instead her hand was on the back of his neck and she was kissing him, taking off her shirt then his, sinking into his skin.

It soothed him as much as it excited him—his thigh in between hers, his hands on her breasts and the soft sounds she made against his ear as their hips ground together. Sleep came after.

…

They didn’t wake as early as they should have. For all her talk of being an early riser, and all the evidence he had seen to support it, Arya’s breaths were still even against the curve of his neck as morning light filtered through the crack below the door. It would be so easy to fall back asleep, but his responsibilities dangled over his head.

With gentle strokes across her bare back he woke her up, only for her to press her face into his shoulder with a disgruntled hum.

“Isn’t it ‘bout time we got up?” he murmured, even as he contradicted himself and pulled her closer.

“You’re warm,” was her response, muffled against his skin. Her right hand migrated to rest against his neck, fingertips drumming against his pulse.

“I’m the warm one?” Indeed her heat was addicting, it encouraged his hand to explore more territory over her skin, the ridges of her spine, the cords in her neck, the delicate inside of her bicep.

“Obviously,” she huffed, hot breath against his skin. He wanted that breath mixed with his and dragged her face up to see it done.

They were adept at kissing one another by now, Arya knew he liked when her lips found the underside of his jaw and he knew the precise amount of pressure on which to tug her lips to make her moan against him. It felt too good to stop, despite the concerns he had raised for himself just minutes earlier, lost in the feeling of Arya’s hair running between his fingers and the heel of her hand pressing just over his heart.

It was less heady than the night before in the dark, everything sharper in the relief of day when her chest was already bare against his. Arya must have agreed because when they paused to catch their breath their eyes locked, hers bright and bashful despite her position of being firmly nestled in his lap.

“I don’t think we need to get up quite yet,” she whispered just before shifting her hips forward. She made a very convincing argument.

He nodded in agreement, closing the short distance between them so that they could kiss at their leisure. Everything was hazy and sweet, the places on her stomach and arms where her skin pebbled, the way the peaks of her breasts brushed against his chest, how her hands had traveled from his shoulders to rest just below his navel, thumbs stroking maddingly. He wasn’t aware of groaning against her mouth, but he must have because Arya pulled away just a bit, a glint in her eye.

Her hands traveled lower, fingers curled underneath the hem of his pants, mirroring how his thumbs were hooked under hers where her back dimpled. He wanted to see her naked, wanted to be naked with her, touch her where it would keep her eyes shining.

“Let’s?” He asked, feeling the heat on his face surge in apprehension. The delicate motion of Arya’s head was hardly a nod, but the kiss she pressed upon him was undeniably affirmative, as was the way her fingers loosened his waistband. Her eyes were curious as she helped him undress, the corner of her bottom lip caught underneath her teeth.

She smiled when he was bare before standing to remove the last of her own clothing. She didn’t possess the grace his younger brain had assumed women had when they disrobed, but there was the quick efficiency he expected of Arya, and it was more arousing than anything is adolescent brain could have thought up. She was beautiful, the lines of her body sturdy and delicate. He told her as much.

“You’re one to talk,” she said, cheeks pink as she laid down next to him in a position similar to how they had woken up, the narrowness of the cot forcing them to press against one another. Never before had he been so aware of his skin, the feeling of his thigh between Arya’s was different than when it had been in the same place the night before with their clothes on. It made him almost unsure of where he should put his hands. But Arya’s knew were to rest, on his hip and the back of his neck to pull him closer. It was easy to mimic her movements.

Their naked flesh pressed together worked to intensify the feeling of their lips and tongues running over each other. He was made to gasp when her fingertips ran over his shoulders and the insides of his arms, places he had never considered to be sensitive before. The desire to clutch at her was strong, and he had to remind himself to move slowly, to savor her sighs as he touched the back of a knee or the underside of her breast.

“Can you touch me for real now?” She said, breaking apart their kiss after an indeterminate amount of time with a deep inhale.

“I have been,” he said, but he knew what she meant, and the twitch of his hands gave him away. Anticipation and nerves made an odd combination.

There was a twitch to her eye, playful and knowing, and it should have told him what she was going to do next—take his hand and guide it between her legs, where she was wet and warm.

It was impossible to look anywhere but her face as he began to stroke his fingers. Missing the way her teeth let go of her lower lip to fall into a delighted oh and then a soft smile when she guided his hand to just the right spot would have been criminal. As would be failing to notice the hazy light in her eyes as she reached out to touch him too.

They couldn’t do anything that could get her pregnant, but it didn’t really matter because he could imagine it with her hand around him, and his fingers in her. It was almost too sweet as it was.

That early morning was just warmth and hands and gasps and a pleasure he’d never known before. And it was all Arya.

…

Warmth from their morning dripped down from their skin into their bones and made the both of them lazy. Arya did not dissuade him when he suggested that they simply follow the main road instead of venturing onto a more difficult, if more bountiful, trail.

It was a relaxed walk, one where they needn’t pay attention to where they had come from or what turns they had made. It was good to be outside again, after being trapped by the walls of the inn with the smell of sickness for the day before. And to be alone with Arya.

Even on a path that animals avoided Arya kept her eyes sharp, and when there was a rustle in the brush, she was off like a dart. Twice she emerged successfully, two chipmunks as contributions for dinner.

They were debating when would be best to turn around and venture back, even as they continued forward. It was as they followed a curve in the road to avoid a sharp slope of stone that the decision was made for them.

Trees encroached on the road at both sides, and winter’s lack of upkeep had encouraged branches to drape overhead even more. None more so than the oak up ahead. It had a trunk as thick as a doorway. The weightiest of its branches cleared Gendry’s head by a little over a foot. During summer, with green foliage, it would be regal. Now, the only thing decorating its boughs were two hanging dead men.

They couldn’t have been dead for more than a day, they were stiff but not bloated, and yet they hardly looked like men, faces forced downwards and clothes hardly enough to save their dignity. Flies hovered by their eyes.

‘MURDERS’ was carved in the space between the nooses. The only name they would have in death.

The ground wasn’t muddy anymore, but it still felt like Gendry’s boots were sinking in it. The possibility of movement didn’t cross his mind until he felt Arya shift closer to him, her fingers at his elbow.

“This was my mother wasn’t it?” She whispered. He turned his head to the ground, knowing she didn’t need his confirmation. Scuffed and displaced dirt met his eyes on the road in front of the tree, like there had been an audience to the execution.

“We should bury them,” he said. They deserved some living compassion, if the last thing they had seen in this world had been the undead.

“We haven’t got shovels,” Arya said, and anger almost sparked in him at the thought that she was dismissing his morals. A single glance her way suggested she was concerned only with practicality. If he turned back now for shovels they wouldn’t finish digging before sundown.

“Burn them then.”

Gendry didn’t know how much kindling was needed for a pyre, and it was a sour thought that even his noblest intentions would still end up being shallow.

It took over a half hour to gather what looked like enough tinder in the center of the road, the only place lighting a large fire wasn’t a risk to the rest of the woods. In an effort to remove the spectacle of death they were creating another one. He didn’t allow himself to think of it as such, not when he struck his flint, not when Arya climbed the tree to cut the ropes as he caught the legs and torsos of the dead men and carried them like babes or brides, heavier than anything he’d ever moved. It was an aching labor, made sorer by the silence—the one between him and Arya as well as the absence of birds.

They stayed as the flames grew taller, as much a vigil as a precaution that the fires didn’t spread. He thought he’d become desensitized to the smell of burning long ago, but this was something else.

When the flames were at their greatest height Arya spoke, her words only barely audible under the crackle and splinter of wood.

“When I ran with wolves, we hunted bad men,” she said, her voice near hollow. “Because I thought it would make me feel better, feel something. And it did, for a while.” Shame colored her whisper. He turned to take her in his arms, stroked her back, held the back of her head. Arya kept talking, words muffled against his chest.

“But then winter came, and I couldn’t care about it so much anymore. Anger didn’t keep me warm, the wolves did, and what if Sansa was cold? We had been apart for so long, what if something happened to here and I could have protected her?”

“Hey, hey, you’ll find her.” Arya squeezed him harder. He watched the fire grow dimmer over Arya’s head, instead of thinking about what those words meant.

Silence reigned between them on the walk back to the inn. At dinner, neither he nor Arya ate. Jimmie was eager for conversation that night, but it was the last thing Gendry wanted. He brushed off his curiosities of the day and let himself feel as tired as he was. He only brightened when Jeyne came down briefly to collect dinner and assured him, she was resting as a precaution, and that she was fine, really. But then she was back to bed.

The kids weren’t even done with the meal when he rose, eager to go back to his forge and his cot and hope that dreams wouldn’t plague him. He rested his hand on Arya’s shoulder as he stood, nodding towards the door. Her hesitation spoke volumes before she said anything.

“I think I’ll stay.” Her eyes were apologetic, like she regretted the decisions she was making too. If not of the inner conflict in her tone, he would have asked again. “I’ll help Willow get all of them to bed. And keep an eye on Jeyne tonight, make sure she’s all better.”

His heartbeat accelerated in a twisted sort of anticipation even as the call of sleep pulled at his eyelids and settled heavy on his shoulders. Rest would come much easier if she was with him, but she would be more needed here. He gave her a gentle nod and she raised herself on her toes to kiss him goodnight.

It was the first time they showed such affection in front of any of the others, and he could feel Willow’s eyes on them; she said nothing about it. Foreboding wrapped around Gendry like a cloak on his walk back to the forge.

  
…

The morning sun shone bright into his forge accompanied by the chatter of birds. Gendry felt a pit in his stomach and an ache in his heart. It was just after dawn.

He dressed only in the essentials needed to keep himself warm, didn’t bother with his crossbow or his carving knives. His boots were loosely tied.

There was a bright countenance about the inn when he arrived, the last of the snow had melted off the roof, and even the mud around the front door had a particular shine to it. When he opened the door there was a flutter of wings as a bird took off behind him. None of the children were in the main room, just some of their muddy footprints and the beat of their steps upstairs. Arya was alone, sitting on the bench closest to the door, her packed bag at her feet.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, standing and taking her bag in hand. She caught the door before it could close fully behind him. With a nod she indicated that he should follow as she took a step outside.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” He asked, once they were a far enough away from the inn that they wouldn’t be heard by a pair of curious ears stuck out of a window.

Arya stopped and took his hands in hers. “It’s spring now Gendry, I can’t—“ She caught herself, a lip under her teeth. It was almost odd, being outside and seeing all of her face. His eyes were stuck to hers as she talked, eager to catch up each of her words, in case they were among the last he’d ever hear from her.

“It’s spring now,” she tried again. “And safe to travel. I can’t justify staying here any longer, even if—”

“Even though you want to?” The words were gruff out of his mouth, thick where they left his throat. He had never heard himself desperate before. Arya offered a small nod, her eyes blinking rapidly.

“I have to, Gendry, you know—” She swallowed. “Spring’s meant to be a new beginning.”

“Didn’t your father say to beware of false springs?” He hated how desperate he sounded. Hated that he missed someone standing in front of him.

Her smile was sad. “But only a fool ignores what’s right in front of them.” The last time he had cried it had been in frustration, when he was cold and wet and hungry. He had never been heartbroken before. Brimming with anger and the urge to shout, yes, but not the desperate need to beg that he felt now. Because he was right in front of Arya too.

“I’m right in front of you,” he exhaled in one breath, feeling stupid and brave all at once.

“I have to find my family, Gendry,” she said, sounding like she was begging too. And it was stupid to say, when Arya was as determined as spring in her quest to move forward, but…

“I could be your family.” He swallowed. “We all could. Jeyne and Willow and Mable and—”

“Gendry,” she interrupted. There was a conflicted look on her face, and for a moment it gave him a spark of happiness before a needle of guilt reminded him of his selfishness. “If…I’d like to come back, but I have to find my sister.”

“I know,” he said, just like he knew how long that would take, how far it would take her away. He exhaled. “Good luck.”

She rose up to kiss him, light, and sweeter than he deserved. It lasted only a moment, for the ache of it was like biting into an icicle. But she chased his lips, this second kiss full of pressure and the premonition of a promise. He wished they hadn’t left his forge yesterday morning, that they had been selfish and held each other longer. But it had to end, and it did; Arya was incapable of making more words for him before she turned away, hoisting her pack higher on her shoulder in determination. She might come back, if she was successful. They mattered to one another, he knew that. But if she didn’t…

“Wait.”

He wanted to give her something to remember him by, a gift, though his hands were empty. He was a poor bastard and it was hardly spring, and he was left standing in front of her like an idiot, wishing his forge was running so he could make her a knife or a pretty arrowhead, something sharp enough for her. But all his thick stumbling fingers could think to give her was the rabbit foot off his belt. It had proved lucky enough, the first beacon of spring.

“Here,” he said, taking long steps to meet her, pressing it into her hand, and wishing he could feel her skin instead of her glove. “A wolf gave that to me, if you can believe it.” She was smiling before he’d even finished speaking. Like it was some great gift after all. “Maybe now you’ll be lucky enough to find her,” he rambled on, his words as fast as his quivering heart.

“Thank you, Gendry,” she whispered and tied it onto her own belt. “I’m very glad I met you.”

“Me too.” There was not another parting kiss, but Arya looked over her shoulder at him twice before her figure was swallowed by the trees and the call of his name drew him back inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tell me what you think! :D


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Spring everybody, hope you enjoy reading this conclusion as much as I enjoyed writing it!

In her typical fashion, Jeyne refused to acknowledge her limits. She was climbing the steps to the larder when he came back from checking his snares, the only one in the kitchen.

“You were bed ridden for two days, and then you decide to go climbing,” he said, closing the door behind him, “Come on, Jeyne.”

“I’m grand,” she said, stepping down carefully with salted meat in hand. Her eyes were piercing where they landed on him as she started chopping it up. He refused to shuffle under her gaze. “Are you?”

“Course,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. Perhaps not his most subtle avoidance tactic.

Ria was sweeping in the main room, Nev trailing behind and tugging the ribbon tied around her waist. None of the other children were to be seen.

“Oddly quiet in here,” he commented as Ria opened the front door and swept the dirt out.

“They’re upstairs. Someone found a mouse gnawing through the towels and now they’re on a proper witch hunt to find it.” That poor creature. Gendry sat down as Ria put away the broom and gathered Nev into her arms and promptly placed him on her hip while approaching the stairs, only to be stopped by a thunder of footsteps making their way down.

“Look at all the geese!” Cried Mable, with undistilled excitement. In a flash she was across the room and wrenching open the front door. The rest of them could do nothing but answer her urgent call and follow her outside.

The sky was overrun. Thousands of birds flew overhead in distinct Vs, enough arrowheads for an entire army. Individual honks meshing together to create a blanket hum over their heads; it was near incompressible in magnitude. And oddly majestic.

Chatter in the front yard was light, pointed fingers and eager awing, but mostly just wide-eyed amazement. Hana, Samara, and Selma all held hands a few paces in front of him, and when Gendry turned his head, he could see Willow crouching down to be eye level with Pen. Gendry was just outside the front door, standing alone. He lingered a moment longer, looking at the geese, then went back inside. They were just birds.

With the stew set to simmer, and her head peaked out the front window to satisfy her curiosity, Jeyne now had a moment to rest and was sitting at the bench closest to the fire.

“Guess it’s really spring then.” She hummed and picked at a loose thread at the corner of her shawl, eyes looking past him.

“Feels more like it every day,” he said, standing against the wall. He only came back inside to pick up his things before returning to the forge. He wanted to be alone for a while. Jeyne’s eyes were intent however, shifting between him and the fire, and the notion of a quick departure was no longer a possibility.

“Are you going to make plans to leave soon? Go somewhere where you can actually make something of your trade?” There was a flat quality to her voice, one that shared the eeriness of a completely still pond. It felt suddenly like there was a pebble clinking in his empty ribcage, bruising bones he couldn’t soothe. Did she ask such a question because she wanted him to go or because she wanted him to stay?

He didn’t offer an answer. “Haven’t got any money, Jeyne.”

“But you will. A couple more frosts, maybe, but then there’ll be trade again. You know that.” She paused and held his gaze, as if she was trying to knock something into his head with her eyes alone. It didn’t work. She huffed. “It’s not wrong to want things for yourself, Gendry,” she said. Gendry wanted to change the subject, didn’t know why they were talking about this kind of stuff in the first place when Willow was the sentimental one.

“What did Willow say to make you all soft?”

“I have a passel of orphans under my roof and you think I’m cold?”

He let his voice go softer. “Of course not.”

Jeyne let out an exasperated click of her tongue and folded her arms, tucking her shawl closer to her chest.

“It’s spring now,” Jeyne said, with a confidence he hadn’t heard from her in years. “Soon I’ll find homes and work for all of these ones. You don’t owe any of us anything, you never did.”

“Stop talking like that.” He didn’t like the thought of the inn being empty. “I could have a fine business along the road.” It had been one of the first things Arya said when she had seen his forge, in an instant she had been able to see a life for him there.

“You’d stay then? Not set out to find Arya?”

He glared at her, but Jeyne didn’t flinch, she never did.

“No,” he admitted. He couldn’t leave, just as Arya couldn’t stay. His memories of their conversation from that morning were insistent all of a sudden. “She said she might come back.”

Jeyne pursed her lips, she wouldn’t roll her eyes at him, but she wanted to. “Or you might go out and find her.”

He huffed at the casual accusation, his heartbeat accelerating in indignation or embarrassment or something else he couldn’t quite pin down. “I will not.”

“You’re acting as if I never saw the two of you together. You two understood each other. It took me months to figure out even one thought that runs through that thick skull of yours.” She mimed flicking his forehead, ineffective with the space between them, and their difference of opinion.

“Well it doesn’t matter now, does it? I’m staying here and that’s the last thing I’ll be sayin’ about the matter.” He went to fetch his pack and cloak, said a brief goodbye to Jeyne and left out the back door. Geese still flew overhead, and there was no stopping his head from turning heavenward as his feet guided him home. But instead of the majesty from a half hour earlier all he could think about was the likelihood of one of those birds shitting in his eye.

…

His stomach was loud enough to be a crier for a rebellion the next morning, and he hated himself a bit for storming off before dinner was served. The hunger wasn’t sharp enough to make him go to the inn that morning however, it was overwhelmed by the itch in his mind; one that he picked at, like it was a scab, until it till it bled anew, and his anger was as fresh as the day before. As if he could ever leave, the nerve of Jeyne to suggest it, like she didn’t know him at all.

Recognizing the rush of his blood made him desperate for steel to beat against, but he had none. Fishing it would have to be instead, to cool his frustration, or at least redirect it. The weather, while noticeably warmer than it had been a month previous, was still sharp with chill, and not quite conducive for hours spent standing still by the water. Gendry toughed it out though, and caught three fish for the trouble.

One of them he fried up for himself. There wasn’t much meat to it and the spindly bones got stuck between his teeth more than once, but the flavor of it was hearty, and the grease salty when he liked it from his fingers. The other two he would take back to the inn, but not before stealing a few more minutes for himself. He shaved for the first time in weeks after buffing the ice in a spot it wasn’t broken to see his reflection better. The fishing and meal had calmed him, or so he thought, until a normally steady hand broke skin on the underside of his jaw and a spot of red stained his sleeve where he used it to stem the flow. Cold water against his cheeks when he was finished was a shock he felt even in his toes, but he felt better. Like a man ready for spring.

Dinner at the inn was a quiet affair, at least on his end. Jeyne and Willow both sent him questioning glances but verbalized no comments, so he felt secure in ignoring them. The stew was the heartiest he had eaten in years, the stag still feeding them well. Gendry spooned from the bowl to his mouth and forgot to savor it.

Jimmie sat himself beside him and asked if might be able to go on another hunt, without Mable this time.

“No,” he said, trying to be firm but not gruff and likely failing in the endeavor. Jimmie frowned and his mouth crumpled, but he didn’t ask a second time, and made no demands. Gendry finished his meal and left shortly thereafter.

That evening he spent moving his anvil back into its proper place by the fire, his cot moved to the opposite wall. Lying in his bed that night he faced the embers, watched them fade from a lit orange to a smoky grey until the fire finally died, and they were black like everything else in the moonless night. A shiver struck him in the night, but it wasn’t one of cold.

…

(Like the geese coming back in droves, everything after that seemed to happen at once.)

…

Gendry had neglected his snares the day before and so made it a priority to check them the next morning. The river had calmed to its regular pace without any additional rain, but the softness in the ground lingered. It would take an impressive frost to harden it up again.

Even with two days of absence, his snares were empty. The twine he used in the last one had frayed away, so he crouched to fix it, searching for patience in himself so that it would be done right.

The tasked was almost completed when there was a flash of red to his left. For a moment his heart stuttered, thinking it was blood on a wolf’s maw, or a cardinal’s feathers being lifted by the breeze. Of course it was neither. Instead, a young woman, long red hair unbound, sat a mule across the stream. The beast had just slowed to a stop from a frantic trot, immediately bending its head to drink from the river as its mistress slipped from her saddle. Her breath came out in clouded pants like she had been the one doing the running and not her mount. Her hands shook as she attempted to readjust her saddle bags. She was afraid.

With that in mind he called out tentatively, trying not to startle her as he rose from his crouch. “Hello?”

She almost toppled over from the force of the sudden jerky movement that turned her to face him.

“Are you alright?” He asked as he approached his bank of the stream. She didn’t answer right away and was not subtle in the manner in which she evaluated him. A great part of her looked as if she wanted to direct the mule further downstream and widen the berth between them, and yet she stayed. It was with reluctance that she began to speak.

“I—” She exhaled again. “There are wolves.”

Her hands had a death grip on the reins now, but she didn’t steer them away. It was a bit of an unconventional compliment to be believed to be less frightening than a wolf. Or wolves, rather. She had seen more than one.

“There are,” he agreed, “if you’d like I can show you an inn nearby. The innkeeper is a good friend of mine, and she’ll let you work to pay off the cost if you haven’t got any coin.” 

She considered it for a long moment before reluctantly nodding her agreement. He directed her to a shallow place where she and her mule could cross and waited while she did. Providing a new guest wasn’t the same as providing meat for a meal, but Jeyne couldn’t be too mad, seeing as he wasn’t returning emptyhanded.

Her mane of red hair was even more vibrant up close, thick as a cloak over her head. It fell so that the tips brushed against the top of her thighs. Despite the wind and her travels, it laid flat and undisturbed. It was unnatural, and something about her manner unnerved Gendry. He was sure to keep more than an armlength between them.

But he wasn’t going to be rude. “What’s your name?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m Gendry.”

When she denied him a response a second time, he cut his losses. That was all the effort he was going to make for someone with tenser table manners than his.

It occurred to him, when the inn was in sight, that his assessment might have leaned towards uncharitable, what with the woman having some sort of encounter with wolves, but he had been in a rotten mood these last few days, and he couldn’t make himself care. Especially when she denied his offer to stable her mule for her. He left her behind in their drafty stable and went inside to tell Jeyne about her.

“She looked well off,” he said when Jeyne asked if the woman had money, “clean, you know?”

“I have grain to trade,” she said, coming in the kitchen door as if his words had summoned her. If she was offended by his comment she had nothing to say about it, eyes only for Jeyne, a sack offered. It was accepted and inspected before Jeyne nodded her assent, putting away the grain, and returning with the guest book and writing implements.

It had been many months since he had seen the collection of thick pages tied together with string. Once it had been a properly bound book, but the spine had broken long before Jeyne had taken charge, and all four corners of the front cover were curled and worn. Jeyne licked one finger than flipped to where a ribbon marked the next clean page. It was half filled, and Gendry could spot his own name on the fifth to last filled line, the column where his charge was written crossed off instead of checked as paid.

Arya, of course, was the latest guest. The curve of the y in her name was soft in Jeyne’s handwriting. He blinked. 

“A bed and a meal, please,” the woman said. “I’ll just need to stay the one night. But I’d like a meal tomorrow morning too, before I continue on my way home.”

“I’ll consider the grain payment, so long as you bake the bread,” Jeyne negotiated. The woman accepted the stipulation with a quick nod. “And your name?”

“Sansa.”

A tickle of familiarity nipped at the nape of his neck. “Sansa?” He repeated, and she looked at him. There was something about her eyes, not the color, but how they sat in her face, divided by a thin nose. He recalled with an exhale, Arya pressed to his chest, wondering if she had failed to protect her sister, and calling her Sansa. “Are you Arya’s sister?”

Sansa looked like he had struck her. Perhaps he had, some devious blow to the heart. “Arya’s alive?” She didn’t look so much like her sister with her eyes wide. “You know her?” There wasn’t quite vulnerability about her, but she didn’t regard him with such circumspect suspicion any longer.

“Aye, she was here three days ago. She’s looking for you.” Sansa’s face fell into an expression like she was trying to cry and could not.

“Oh,” she murmured, hands pressed to her cheeks. “I half convinced myself she was dead.”

“We saw her healthy just this week,” Jeyne said, setting down her pen and folding her hands. She looked as if she would have like the comfort Sansa but felt too awkward to make the gesture.

“Do you know where she was going?” Sansa asked after a moment, she had greatly recovered herself, but seemed to still hesitate away from any expression of joy.

“South,” Gendry said, the sight of Arya’s figure shrinking smaller as she walked away fresh in his mind. 

“And to think I was going north…”

After another moment of deep contemplation, in which Sansa picked furiously at a fingernail, she seemed to reconvene with herself, hands flat on the table and manner not unlike a regal lady.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen her,” she said, and then, as if she knew somehow that Gendry had known her best, she turned to look at him with blue eyes like the hottest part of a fire. “Did you know her well? Tell me about her.”

“Aye, we were—” lovers, “close.” He hadn’t been expecting that fierceness after how nervous she had been in the woods, but he should have. This was Arya’s sister.

So he told, in rough starts and stops, how they had met, how she had come to stay at the inn, how she helped them each day, and how she had left. Jeyne left sometime during his explanation but kept the door to the main room cracked. Sansa nodded when he finished, as if insisting he continue.

“That’s all there is to say.” It wasn’t, of course. He didn’t make mention of the wolves or their mother for fear of scaring her. And felt it his right to not mention their intimacy. “She was here just about two weeks.”

“Will you help me find her?”

A snare snapped in his chest. The conversation he had with Jeyne just two days previous flooded his mind. “You trust me?” He asked, because that seemed like a distracting question.

“I’m making it a habit to not trust men, but I will if you help me find my sister.”

“I will,” he promised. Because the person sitting across from him was who Arya had set out to find. It wasn’t some heartsick venture; it was the right thing to do. She was only three days ahead of them now, they could make up the distance, and if he could bring them back together…

“Thank you,” Sansa said, “we’ll leave early tomorrow.” Standing, she turned her back in dismissal. “I suppose I better start baking that bread.”

…

His late morning was spent answering questions about their new guests. Apparently, Samara, Mable, and Jimmie had all snuck out to the stables to peer at her mule, declaring it well fed and beautiful. That was the most exciting news until Selma announced she was Arya’s sister.

He glared. “What have Jeyne and I said about eavesdropping, Selma?”

She giggled and got away with it as the dining room erupted in exclamations. He had to bat away more than two prodding fingers. Not even his and Jeyne’s combined raised voices could quiet them down. It was only after Jeyne’s hoarse voice broke down into a cough that the kids were made to be silent, all of them sucking in a collective breath. He sighed and figured he might as well make the announcement. 

“I’m going with her tomorrow to reunite her with Arya.” Jeyne immediately snapped her head to look at him, eyebrows almost at her hairline. At least she had enough tact not remind him of his prior words with so many watching eyes.

“But…you’ll come back,” Pen said, the statement somewhere between a question and command.

“Course,” he said, and patted the back of his head. That seemed to placate the room. Enough for Jeyne to make her way to his side. He hated how she didn’t even have to say anything.

“You said that I should do something for myself,” he said, petulant and low, “And this is the right thing to do.”

Because she took great joy in catching him off guard, Jeyne smiled. “Alright then. So long as you come back.”

He went back to the forge to pack properly and returned to debate with Jeyne about the number of rations she was willing to give them. By the time that was all sorted it was an hour till dinner back at the inn. Sansa’s bread was done by then, the loaf coarse and crusty, but hearty and warm in his belly. He picked crumbs off his shirt and thought of butter.

The children were milling about the main room, waiting for the call for dinner, the slices of bread a treat long since devoured. Everyone being present made it almost startlingly obvious when the front door creaked open. A man entered, worn by travel. He was about Gendry’s height, but twice his age, his skin tight and dry at his temple and around his eyes. The furrow between his brows would suggest a grouchy disposition, but the man’s mood leaned more towards solemnness. His eyes moved about the room too fast and with too much curiosity to be aloof. 

Willow went at once to fetch Jeyne from the kitchen, even as the man approached Gendry, seeming to think he was in charge. A sour taste etched the back of Gendry’s tongue as the man tracked mud against the floor, not even bothering to stomp his boots on the doormat.

“Lots o’ kiddies, huh?” He said to Gendry with the false air of comradery that Gendry had put up with in boyhood but had forsaken as a man. He was saved from having to come up with an answer when Jeyne arrived, account book in hand.

“Good evening sir, how can I help you tonight?”

Gendry took a step back, but let one eye linger on the interaction, relieved to find no lascivious intention in the man as he explained his need for a bed and meal for the night. He paid upfront, in minted coins.

“Would you look at that,” Willow said, sidling up to him, bowls in hand. “Two guests in one day. Roads must be gettin’ busier.” She smiled as she handed out the bowls and they sat down to eat.

Sansa and their male guest, whose name Gendry had failed to catch, sat at opposite sides of the long table, the kids filling in gaps between. Most of the girls were taken with Sansa, her dress, apparently was of a thick, fine fabric which was at once an envy. One that was only compounded by her glossy hair, which had both Samara and Selma sitting on their hands to stop themselves from reaching out to touch it.

At the other end of the table, Jimmie, and Pen by association, asked the other guest for news, which he provided in between heavy sighs. Jeyne sat beside him at the center, her eyes skating between her two guests. Dinner was tasty, a proper bowl of brown, with flour to thicken it. He was just about finished with his portion when Jeyne spoke.

“So you’re going after Arya after all.” Gendry’s eyes pressed closed, he had hoped his announcement from that morning would have been forgotten in the evening’s excitement. But Jeyne’s mind was a trap stronger than any of his snares.

“Do you have anything to say besides gloating?” He used his finger to scrape the last of the juice from the bowl, eyes intent on the menial task. Jeyne just hummed, as if he didn’t already know she was smarter than him. She left him with his thoughts soon after, and, he realized, after a too long moment spent in his head, with the task of getting the kids to bed.

Willow was far more adept at cajoling the children into bed with her patience and persuasive voice. With them all eager and alert from the day’s excitement, he felt even more ill-equipped, but eventually they were herded up the stairs. Jimmie was the last stalwart, he was still talking to the older guest, who at least didn’t seem so annoyed by him now.

“Bedtime Jimmie,” he said, making sure not to leave any wiggle room in his voice.

“You’re not in charge of me!” Jimmie spat back, and Gendry was almost taken aback by his vitriol.

“Well I’m going to bed,” he said, “but by all means stay up to prove a point.”

He had been considering taking up his normal place below the mantle in preparation for his early departure with Sansa, but he was likely to sleep better on his cot. And after dealing with Jimmie’s lip he thought a fresh walk back to the forge might do him some good. Hard ground would be his only bed for the next few days, he’d enjoy his cot while he had it.

…

He slept like a bear in the dead of winter and awoke with a deep contentment, his eyelids light. With his pack strapped to his back and a vague map of direction towards Arya in his mind he weaved his way back to the inn, determined to make good progress.

The front door was cracked an inch or two when he arrived; he expected to encounter Jeyne sweeping when he entered, or at least someone sitting by the long table after taking a peek outside. It was empty, and slightly cooler for the ajar doorway. Perhaps the wind had been thrashing the previous night, and he had slept through it. He pulled the door closed behind him, waiting for the tumbler to click into place.

Willow was in the kitchen baking their normal porridge into cakes with some of the extra flour. They were close to done and the warm smell brightened him.

The promise of breakfast beaconed little feet down the stairs, and both Mable and Selma stuck curious noses into the kitchen before Willow shooed them away, with Gendry right behind. Everyone seemed to be awake for breakfast with the exception of their second guest, although Gendry couldn’t fathom sleeping through the ruckus of all the kids getting ready in the morning. Perhaps he had left already.

He meant to go sit next to Jeyne, but she was conversing with Sansa rather intensely with the sort of instant familiarity women often had with each other, so he sat himself by Pen instead, who was scratching at the table in what Gendry figured to be impatience.

It was less than ten minutes later that the cakes were done, enough for one each, Willow declared brandishing a wooden spoon ready to slap away any thieving hands. They all ate quickly, careful not to spill crumbs

Until Mable asked in a rush of breath, as if in a race, “Can I have the extra? The man isn’t here!” 

“I didn’t make one for him,” Willow said, looking at the cake in suspicion before turning to Jeyne. “You said he was leaving early.”

“He did,” Jeyne said slowly, looking annoyed at being teared away from her conversation with Sansa. Her sharp eyes flitted between each of their faces before she sighed. “Is Jimmie still abed?”

Gendry scratched at the hinge of his jaw when he noticed that the other space next to Pen was occupied by Mable, and not his closest friend. His mouth was dry, and the flavor from the cake was turning stale on his tongue.

“Is he still asleep?” Samara asked, with an unimpressed edge to her voice. She directed the question at Pen, who he shared a room with. 

“Probably,” Pen said, pulling the soft little rings of brown hair to lay over his forehead and brush against his eyelashes. If it was longer Gendry would bet that he’d chew on the ends of strands in the same fashion as Selma.

“Well if he’s not downstairs in five minutes then I get to eat it,” Mable pronounced, arms crossed, and eyes set on the porridge cake. Jeyne, of course, was not swayed to Mable’s will. She stood with a brief shake of her head and went to the stairs and yelled Jimmie’s name.

There was no sleepy groan, no petulant stomping of feet. Just the creak of a wooden board as Pen shifted next to him. When another threat was shouted up the stairs with no response Jeyne huffed and began to climb, making sure each step thundered with warning.

“He’s in trouuuble,” Selma snickered, but no one joined her to giggle. Nev began to hiccup, and Pen was scratching at the table again, hard enough for his nail to leave a line of white in the wood.

“Stop that,” Gendry said softly, taking Pen’s hand in his and unfurling his bent thumb. “If you keep going like that you’ll make your finger bleed.”

Pen looked up at him, eyes red and watery through the fringe of his hair, and tears began streaming down his face when Jeyne came back downstairs, her voice stern and deadly cool.

“Pen, where is Jimmie?”

Gendry held fast to Pen, tighter than he meant. The boy refused to look at either him or Jeyne. He looked to the table instead, and his shoulders quivered.

“I didn’t want to!” He whispered, the words almost unintelligible. But once he spoke his little body seemed to crumble, overtaken with sobs. “But I promised, and he said it would be ok!”

“Pen,” Jeyne repeated, “where is Jimmie.”

“He left last night,” Pen said, tears and mucus collecting on his upper lip as he gasped for breath. Ria sat beside Pen now, one hand circling the center of his back, the other reaching across the table to loosen Gendry’s grasp on Pen’s hand. He had forgotten he was holding it. His fingers felt stiff when he set them in his lap. Stiff and cold, like the blood in his veins.

Ria used the corner of her smock to clear the tears from Pen’s lip and eyes, the hum of her voice mixing with Pen’s hiccoughing gasps and filling all their ears with unease.

Gendry stood up, uncomfortable with the nervousness in his body. His jaw was so tight he could have cracked a tooth. He moved to stand beside Jeyne. There was a shiver in her shoulders, like she was feverish again.

“Left to go where?”

“With-with Mr. Jack. He wanted to make n-new friends, so he left with Mr. Jack.”

“Where?” Jeyne stalked forward. A gust of wind outside rattled the left wall.

“Give him a minute Jeyne!” Willow snapped, having replaced Gendry by Pen’s side. Her face was pale, even her lips devoid of color. They spoke that elusive language of sisters for a moment, and when Willow turned her head back to Pen, Jeyne settled in place.

Gendry took that moment to focus on his breathing, to sooth the feeling of the ribs on either side of his breastbone knitting together. Only for his skin to shatter with chills at Pen’s next words.

“The Lady,” he whispered, ashamed. “Mr. Jack is with the Lady.”

And now so was Jimmie.

“No,” Jeyne said, but Gendry was looking at Sansa. Her brow crinkled on one side; her face still mostly composed. If she knew what her mother was now, she didn’t show it. “No,” Jeyne continued, “We haven’t heard heads or tails of them in years. They’re south of here.”

Firmness and conviction rung like clear bells in Jeyne’s voice, and suddenly shame coated Gendry’s throat and tongue. How short-minded he had been in these past few days. Focused selfishly on himself. He closed his eyes.

“No, they’re near here,” he admitted. “Arya and I saw two hung bodies a few miles along the main road the day before she left. It could not have been anyone else.”

When he opened his eyes he was met with Jeyne’s own, wide with fury. “And you didn’t think to tell me!” She was yelling now, all her anger directed at him, and he was glad of it, deserved it far more than Pen or Jimmie. He wasn’t a child fueled by careless inexperience. 

“I’m sorry, Jeyne. I’m sorry.”

“I can’t believe you.” He felt ten again, his master’s eyes sharp with ire, and worse, disappointment, when he had ruined an ore with his carelessness. But he had never made that mistake again. “You agreed to help me keep them safe.”

“Stop yelling!” Hana interrupted, her eyes wet. Selma was curled up next to her, hands pressed to her ears. For the first time Gendry remembered the room’s audience. He felt horrid.

Nev was hiding under the table, face pressed into Ria’s skirts, undeterred by her shaking leg. Mable was scratching at her bare forearms, her mouth turned into an unnatural line, swallowing any sound that threatened to emerge. Sansa was looking at him, hands folded in her lap, eyes sympathetic and questioning.

“I’ll go and find him,” Gendry said, looking away from Sansa and the promise he was breaking. “I’ll leave right now.”

“You’re going to track down a group of blood-thirsty brigands?” Jeyne said, the anger washed away by the moment of calm and contemplation. Tiredness replaced it without a misstep.

“Yes.” He turned to Sansa. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you find Arya.” She couldn’t have been shocked, but she surprised him with the keen edge in her eyes.

“Or,” she countered, “we still leave together in search for Jimmie, and look for my sister afterwards.”

He opened his mouth to decline, he would be taking Jimmie straight home when he found him, but there was a no-nonsense shape to her face, so he inclined his head.

“As you like, then.” He stood, feeling like a spectacle, and collected his things. Sansa did the same, and the entire room felt uncomfortable as they prepared to depart, too many eyes following him with hopefulness or concern. He bowed his head to avoid the looks as he re-tied his boots, only raising it when there was a tap at his shoulder. 

It was Jeyne, handing him the rations they had discussed the day before.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said. “I’m just worried.”

He accepted the offering.

“Me too. And I’m sorry, for being thoughtless. It wasn’t my intention.”

Jeyne nodded in understanding. She gave him one of her thoughtful, genuine smiles. “Just…bring him home safe.” She squeezed his hands in hers and stepped back so that Willow could spring forward and capture him in a hug, her face pressed into his shoulder.

“Come back soon,” Willow said. “Promise.”

He nodded. Sansa already stood at the threshold. Reluctance he couldn’t quite understand slowed his steps to the door, but determination kept them evenly paced.

With a firm close, the inn’s door shut behind him, his heart in his throat.

…

“Sorry you had to see that,” he said to Sansa after a mile and a half of silence. They had made it to the main road and were making good time on the cleared path.

“No need to apologize to me, it seems I had the easiest morning.”

He had worried at first that she would be unaccustomed to hard walking, what with her cleanliness and her skirts, but she had on sturdy boots beneath them, and seemed at least half accustomed to hikes through the woods. It was clear to him she would have preferred her mule, but it wouldn’t have been able to bare the weight of both of them for very long. And he very much doubted that Sansa would have liked them sitting back to front for hours on end besides. With walking she could keep a respectable distance between them and send him shrewd looks whenever she felt inclined.

“Although I wondered,” she said after a moment, “who was that Lady you spoke about?”

It wasn’t a question. Surety marked each word. Perhaps it was some disguised question he wouldn’t be able to tease out, or a test. Whatever the case, he answered honestly.

“Your mother.” And then, because he didn’t like layered conversations, “I think you know.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s why I wanted to come with you truly. Despite…it all, I’d like to see her again.”

Personally, Gendry was dreading the encounter and could have gone the rest of his years without meeting the frayed woman again. But that didn’t seem a polite thing to say.

“You might not like what you see.” It seemed only fair to warn her.

“I don’t expect to,” Sansa said, “but sometimes you need closure for things.”

By then they had made it to the hanging tree. The word condemning the men and their crime was still etched into the thick branch, but he had to search for it now. When the foliage came in it would be illegible. Even the former pyre hardly looked unusual, the grouping of branches just a tad thicker than was natural. It smelt like wind and dirt, the rot long since banished in that way nature had of mending things.

“This is my only lead,” he said, approaching the place where hooves had previously scuffed the dirt. Pressed his eyes shut in frustration when he saw they were gone.

“Our only lead,” Sansa corrected, eyes scanning where he stood and finding nothing but emptiness.

“Wouldn’t they be going north instead of south, though? If Jack was a member of their group it means he was walking from here to the inn. Makes sense if they continued on that way.”

“But he was alone,” Gendry remarked. Or at least it had seemed as if he was alone. More likely he was surveying the inn for the Lady’s group of bandits, seeing how winter had left them. They had been so careless. “Unless he wasn’t. Damnit. You’d think we’d at least have heard their horses.”

“He wasn’t on horse when he arrived, they probably camped far enough away not to draw attention to themselves and he doubled back there on foot.” They both thought it over before Sansa continued, “My old home is north of here. In spring, perhaps mother would want to go return.” Gendry wanted to argue, he doubted the sentimentality of a dead woman. But he had no ideas of his own, no other places to start.

“That’s where you were planning on going,” he remembered. “How long until we reach there?”

Sansa clung to the strap of her pack and didn’t look thrilled as she thought up a number in her head. She sighed. “I think three weeks, on foot.”

That was too long to be gone, too large a time of uncertainty. “We’ll catch up with them before then,” he said. 

Jimmie might be tall for his age, but he was still young and wouldn’t be able to walk as quickly as he and Sansa. The company might have horses, but with their size they still wouldn’t be able to travel fast, they could catch up. Even so, he hated having to retrace the two miles. What a waste of time.

If Sansa thought similarly, she didn’t say, which was nice of her. He’d had enough with being confronted with his mistakes for the day. They walked on in silence, ears listening for human voices carried on the wind or the trot of hooves. Birds chattered up above, but they were no help.

Gendry missed Arya the more he walked with her sister. Missed her keen eyes and intrinsic sense of the woods. Missed her easy conversation and how she never feared walking close to him. He distracted himself by always keeping a mindful eye, eager to catch on small footprints alongside large ones, or the smell of a campfire. But thoughts of Jimmie weren’t exactly comforting.

It was late afternoon when Sansa began to lag a bit. She didn’t complain, but it was easy to sense her discomfort in the way she shifted her back and shook out her legs. Arya wouldn’t have appreciated him pointing out a slowed pace, so he doubted her sister would.

“You hungry?” He asked. “We can stop and eat for a few minutes.” Even though eating and walking were far from mutually exclusive. “I have to take a piss anyway.”

He handed her his pack and pointed out where the roasted nuts were before stepping off to the ditch to do his business.

“I want to keep going past sunset,” he said when he returned, taking a pull from his canteen before grabbing a handful of nuts for himself. Sansa was chewing and didn’t answer until she was finished.

“That’s alright, I can keep up.”

He took her at her word, figuring it was better than speculating otherwise. They rested and stretched for ten more minutes before they began walking again.

It was harder to remain attentive with the light fading, and even though they marched straight through dusk it didn’t feel as productive as he’d hoped. The sky retained only some of its deep blue hue by the time Gendry was convinced they’d need to make camp. They stepped just far enough off the road to be sheltered. The ground was cold and stiff and there were pebbles digging into his back even after the minutes he’d spent trying to clear them away. Sleep came easy despite the soreness, his limbs tired. He thought he heard Sansa, on the other side of the tree, sometime before he nodded off, asking about creatures in the dark and taking turns watching, but he didn’t care to listen.

…

The birds woke him before the sun the next morning, and when he called out to Sansa she stirred. With quick efficiency they finished packing and had a few bites of jerky for breakfast.

“Should we continue on the road?” He asked as they stood in the middle of it. “Your hometown lies straight on it?”

“Not quite, but it’s the direction we need to go in. When I was fleeing south it was on this road.”

“You haven’t been back since you were a girl.” He meant to start the conversation to tell her about where Arya had been, tried to think of a way to make running with wolves sound believable. But Sansa took it in another direction.

“No, I stayed south.” They were walking now, their pace quick and steady after they had been revitalized by sleep. “I thought it would be easier to start a new life. Make a new family.” She shook her head, self-berating.

“And now that spring’s here you want that closure?”

“Yes.” She was looking straight ahead for once, instead of at her feet or at him. “That, and I’m done with my husband.” Her rage was icy and black, like pond water under thin ice, ready to crack from the lightest step. Gendry didn’t need to be told any more. It was a disgraceful thing, to hurt one’s wife. He nodded to show his agreement.

He wasn’t offended by her appraising looks after that.

Their morning passed much the same as the day before. Silence reigned between him and Sansa as they kept their eyes and ears sharp. But some of the stagnation and stilted awkwardness from the day before began to evaporate, he felt himself warming up to Sansa, out of proximity alone perhaps, but things now didn’t seem so odd and cold between them. Maybe it was another thing the sisters shared, a quality that was unerring and mystical one day and firmly human the next.

Their blooming amity meant, however, that his worries diverted focus from Sansa and her judgmental eyes back to Jimmie, all alone. It was far from a productive tangent and made his forehead ache from how tightly his thoughts and skin were strained. In an effort to distract himself he circled back to the conversation he had attempted to start in the morning.

“I was asking about your home earlier because Arya told me about it. Said she met a wolf pack there after your, uh, family died. And that she stayed with them.”

Sansa didn’t respond, almost as if she hadn’t heard him, but when he turned to look at her, her face was pinched in thought.

He cleared his throat. “In case you were wondering where she’s been.”

They kept walking, the sun sliding west of its peak. A half hour must have passed before Sansa responded.

“I had wondered that, thank you.”

It took him a moment to remember what she was talking about, but when he did, he nodded. “She can tell you about it herself soon enough.”

Sansa hummed and that was the last they spoke until dusk colored the sky orange and purple and they stopped to eat again. Gendry chewed angrily, his frustration had mounted as the day continued without a sign of life, and he was stuck in his head with worried thoughts. He wanted to believe that Jimmie could handle himself, that the Lady’s man had no cruel intentions, but he wasn’t optimistic by nature.

“What are we doing wrong?” He muttered as much as to himself as to Sansa. It occurred to him that this was all based on a stranger’s hunch and that they might be walking in the wrong direction. His knuckles ached from clenching his fists.

“It’s just your lack of patience,” Sansa said. She ate noiselessly, and for some reason at that moment it seemed the world’s greatest annoyance.

He considered snapping at her, that she didn’t understand the severity of losing Jimmie, that she didn’t care. But he smothered his anger instead, knowing it wouldn’t be productive.

“Let’s carry on then,” he said, knowing he was only further demonstrating her point, and not caring.

Not that it made any difference, evening arrived without thought for their endeavors. He went to bed uneasy, even if he slept fast, wishing, before he dreamed, for a guide.

…

Heavy breathing woke him far too early. Midnight’s half-moon shone overhead, creating shades of grey folded onto the black.

“Gendry,” Sansa breathed, the word sounding more like the flutter of leaves through wind than his name. The fog of sleep prevented him from hearing her fear. It wasn’t until he turned and saw how the moonlight caught her pale skin, the sweat on her forehead almost shining in its glow, that he felt danger in the air around them.

Suddenly his body was tense and his blood wild as he looked into the dark trees. Little orbs of light stared back, they would have been marblelike had it not been for the way they shifted, how they seemed hot with life.

It hadn’t been Sansa’s breathing that woke him.

“Shh,” he hummed, as he got up to a crouch, glad he had slept with his boots on. He extended his arm out in front of Sansa’s shoulders, trying to make sure she didn’t bolt or scream. The wolves stalked closer, three of them at least. Their shapes were clearer, even if they were still all black and grey, and Gendry let his arm fall, noticing their relaxed ears and loose jowls. “They won’t hurt us.”

“Wha-?” She got to her feet in one desperate movement. Somehow, she managed not to shake.

“They won’t hurt us,” he said again, unsure where the conviction was coming from, but trusting himself.

Sansa was silent then, watching, still, as two of the wolves approached her. Their tails wagged every so often, and Gendry would have sworn they were desperate for pats. One of the wolves held back though, its eyes on him, curious.

“Oh,” Sansa murmured, her palm open for the wolves to sniff. A laugh escapes, not one of true joy, but of clear relief. Fear slipped off her shoulders.

Gendry kept one eye on Sansa, but most of his focus was on the last wolf, a short distance away. Frost billowed from its nose, and it shifted its weight, almost as if it wanted to approach. Instead it bent its head, dropping something from its mouth onto the ground. 

A tug in his chest pushed him to approach, his hand outstretched but his palm faced down. The wolf sat, head on its front paws, but eyes still intent on him. He crouched just in front of it, his hand searched in the dark for what the wolf had brought, even though he knew, in his gut, what it was.

A rabbit’s foot. Dried and stuffed, with a chain on the end. The fur of it was soft in its palm.

“You know where Arya is,” he whispered, talking to the wolf and thinking for some reason that it could understand him, make decisions for him. It just blinked.

“What was that about Arya?” Sansa asked, she had one hand in the scruff of each wolf. It was as if the fear from moments ago had never existed. He stood and walked back to her, careful not to approach the wolves from behind. His fingers were curled around the rabbit’s foot, he was careful not to crush it in his hand.

He hesitated, something in his heart telling him to squeeze his hand tighter. But her eyes were expectant, and it was her sister they were talking about.

“This,” he said, and showed her. “I gave her this the day she left.”

Sansa’s nose crinkled as she squinted in an effort to get a better look and he ignored the criticism he felt from the rebuff in her eyes.

“You’re sure?”

“Obviously.” He was sharper than he meant. He usually was.

She looked over his shoulder, the wolf was on its feet again, its haunches towards them with its head turned back to look at them in expectation.

“They want us to follow them,” Sansa breathed, her hands curling tighter in the wolves’ fur. “They were never hunting me, they were trying to take me to my sister.”

She smiled then, with her teeth and her eyes, and Gendry wanted to feel that elation, but his stomach sank instead. 

“We’re looking for Jimmie,” he reminded her, even knowing she wouldn’t agree.

“And we don’t know where he is! But we can find Arya now, they’ll take us to her, _I know it_.” As if on command the wolves slipped from her fingers to stand by their packmate. Their eyes were still the only bright things in the dark. It made them arresting, more than a human’s ever could be. His heart called for him to walk behind them.

“I want to find her too,” he said, grateful for the dark so she couldn’t see how much he meant it. He was looking at the ground now. “But she’s a grown woman who doesn’t need our help, and Jimmie’s a little boy far away from home.”

Twigs cracked as Sansa shifted her weight, but they weren’t as stiff as her voice. “I haven’t seen her in seven years.”

“So what does a few more days matter?”

Sansa inhaled sharply. He almost expected her to slap him—felt the phantom of a sting on his cheek. But it was her words that she used to bite down. 

“Would you use your head for a minute instead of whatever guilt complex you’re running on? Wolves are far better at tracking animals than any of us, once they take us to Arya, I’m sure she can tell them to find Jimmie. You said yourself that she ran with them.”

The tension in his chest deflated some. Her logic was sound and pulled sharply at the part of him that had his feet already pointed towards the wolves.

“It’ll be faster,” Sansa continued, softer, after noticing his consideration. “And we’ll keep looking for Jimmie right after.”

Jeyne would skin him if she knew. His own hands pressed into the sockets of his eyes and he was suddenly reminded of how little sleep he got. “Alright,” he said, opening his eyes to Sansa’s suppressed smile. For the first time in their journey she took the lead ahead of him, just behind the wolves, and he trailed behind.

He felt uncertainty under each footstep, his balance thrown off by the conflict inside him.

…

Wolves would not travel on man’s open road. Instead they carved between rocks and trees. Gendry hoped it was some sort of short cut.

Night gave way to the grey of early morning. The wisps of light made his body forgot its exhaustion, the burn in his legs and the stiffness in his feet dulled. Instead, he was addled with some sort of fear as he followed Sansa, who seemed so sure of herself. Though it wasn’t true fear, more like an irritating anticipation. Something that frizzled like water on a hot stone. 

The wolves never stopped, never slowed, and it just made Gendry more frustrated that he couldn’t see what made them turn and weave. At first, he was attentive to the path, so that he might be able to find his way back if need be, but the string of his concentration could only be pulled so far. Sansa was not plagued by the same vexations which made him disinclined to voice his own. 

Two hours in the semi-darkness they walked only for the sun to rise through the trees, too bright to look at. They were walking due east, but he seemed the only one that was bothered. His eyes were strained even when he was only looking at his feet.

Gone was the attentiveness he had been so preoccupied with the day before. His sole concentration now was the path of his feet, pretending that stepping over roots was a distraction. The fact that the trees were thinning didn’t even register to him. It was the smell of ash and smoke that made him finally lift his head. A campfire, with a blaze small and controlled enough that it wouldn’t bother the wolves, and Arya beside it.

She was already on her feet by the time he had the presence of mind to examine his surroundings, her first few steps were ones of disbelief before she was running towards them, and then her arms were around Sansa’s shoulders and the sisters stumbled from the force of the embrace. The wolves circled their feet, yipping.

They spoke words of disbelief to each other, muffled against fur hoods and by the wolves’ excitement. But even from feet away their matching smiles shone. It was the joy in the air around them that finally put his conflicted heart at ease; there was no disastrous mistake. Just Arya turning her head to look at him, her mouth and eyes wide with shock.

He smiled too, unable to help himself at the sight of her.

But before his eyes her face fell and so his did too. She stepped out of her sister’s embrace. Guilt and confusion lined her lips and brow.

“Gendry,” she said, and he would have loved to hear his name from her lips normally, had it not been clouded with hurt. “I— It’s Jimmie” She looked back to Sansa, whose hand still held her wrist. “He’s with my mother.”

“I know,” he said, “we’re looking for him.”

“And found you instead,” Sansa finished, and then, lower. “I know about mother.”

Arya’s face broke out in relief, and Gendry didn’t want to even imagine the emotional toll of explaining to a long-lost sister that their missing mother was an undead wraith. They shared another embrace, this time one of comfort.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Arya said, looking between them both, but settling on him. “I sent them to find you,” she nodded towards the wolves, then swallowed thickly. “The band has set up camp three miles from here. I think they’re stalking Cedar Grove.”

It would take less than an hour to get that far. He could have Jimmie and Arya back before the day was done. “Then we need to go.”

“We should rest and plan,” Sansa countered. “We don’t know how a band of marauders will react to our intrusion, it’s something we need to think through.” Gendry swallowed his impulses. She was right. “And we walked through most of the night,” she explained to Arya.

Arya was nodding, and he found himself doing so as well.

The sisters laid themselves down by the fire, the wolves nuzzled at their backs before slinking off into the trees again, back to wherever their den was. He thought he’d caught sight of water on Sansa’s cheeks, silent tears falling like drops off a melting icicle. Gendry removed himself a bit, leaving them to their reunion. The sort of silent relief that was best left alone.

He settled in the shade of a tree on the edge of the clearing. When the sun moved the shadow off of his face, an hour or two later, he awoke with the light. It wasn’t yet midday.

He stretched a bit, got to his feet, thinking he might have a bite to eat and that he should really refill his canteen. At least until he became aware that he was being watched. Not by wolves this time, but by Arya, who was sitting up next to a still sleeping Sansa.

She got up when he noticed him shaking his canteen, pointing her finger and waiting for him to follow her.

“Should we leave your sister by herself?” He asked, at a far enough distance that he knew his words wouldn’t wake her.

“It’s not far, I doubt she’ll wake up in time. She was really tired, I could tell just by looking at her.”

Sure enough a stream was less than five minutes away. It was the type of water source that would dry up under the summer sun, but with the snow melt and rain from a week ago it still trickled. He splashed some on his face and washed the dirt away from the crevices in between his fingers before filling his canteen. Arya cupped some water in her hands and drank directly from it, her motions rote and unappreciative.

Arya was unlike herself, pensive and quiet. She was scared, he realized. Of her own mother. He reached out to hold her hand as they walked back, and she let him. Not letting go even when they returned to her campfire and sat to face the direction the wolves had gone, Sansa still sleeping behind them. He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb, even as she brought her knees closer to her chest.

“How did you find Jimmie?” He asked when he thought she was up for it, because he had to know.

“By accident mostly,” she sighed, “it’s almost funny, that we found what the other was looking for.” He might have appreciated the irony if it were part of one of Ria’s songs, but there was no enjoyment to be had from a little boy going missing. Arya’s face was solemn in agreement. “But no coincidence. The wolves nudged me in this direction, and it was impossible to miss the company’s path. They need a large space to camp, and it was easy for me to survey it. Yesterday I saw Jimmie right away. I wanted to go and tell you, but I needed to keep an eye on him as well, so I sent the wolves instead.”

That answered one question, but not the one that truly plagued him, the one that made his heart stutter to ask. “Do you think he’s okay?”

“He’s not hurt.” She squeezed his hand. “But I can’t imagine he wants to stay with them now.”

Jimmie had a boy’s bravery, the perceived invincibility of youth. He was not accustomed to cruelty or unkindness.

“So how will we get him back?”

They were quiet then, both thinking. It wasn’t an impossible task, but Gendry wasn’t one for strategy or subtle words. Confrontation he could do, but not in this instance. It made him feel lacking. And then another horrid thought comes.

“What if he won’t come back with me?”

“He will,” Arya answered immediately, her face snapping to look at his, eyes insistent, her grip on his hand even stronger. “You’re his family, not them.”

Her reassurance was a cool balm. She left no room for doubt, and so he felt none. Simple as that.

“What about your family?” It was a roundabout way of asking, but Arya knew his meaning. She looked like she was remembering something bittersweet.

“Sansa will be there, yes. But my mother’s been dead for years.”

“Did you see her?”

Arya nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

She moved so that their clasped hands rested in her lap. So she could hold on to his with both of hers. He liked the gesture very much.

“But I think it would be best if we approached her as her daughters. Maybe she’ll feel…something.” He nodded and let their knees touch. Made sure that his eyes were steady and sure on her whenever she managed to look up from their hands. “And you can sneak Jimmie out. I think that would be best.”

“Alright,” he said, and there were her lovely grey eyes, finally looking into his. “If you can manage it, I certainly can.”

“And afterwards…” Arya’s voice stuttered, and she bit her lip. “I don’t- I don’t think someone can rise from the dead twice.”

Her body was strong and small in his arms when he embraced her. Tight with tension. He stroked her hair and her back and tried to soothe her, afraid when it didn’t work. “Don’t tell Sansa,” she said into his chest. “Just- I don’t know if…”

“Whatever you think is best. And I’ll help you, yeah?”

She nodded against him. He expected the dampness of tears on his shirt, but he felt none. Just Arya’s shivers.

…

It was another half hour before Sansa woke, but it took her no time at all to become alert. The three of them shared a meal as he and Arya explained the plan they discussed, with the exemption of that last, critical, part. Sansa agreed, offering suggestions only twice, in what they would say to the company and their mother.

They planned to approach the gathering at dusk, with enough light to see but also to sneak. It left them with a few hours to waste, hours they would rather not have had, for they lent time to their worries and encouraged them to fester. Sansa and Arya distracted themselves with conversation, catching up after their long separation, and Gendry could tell their dialogue was awkward enough without his interference, so he gave them space. He kicked around stones and pretended he was busy.

His pacing around the uneven border of the clearing meant he was the first one to spot the wolves. There was more than three of them now, and yet they walked on silent paws, weaving between trees, in and out of sight like tricks of the light. Maybe they were. He couldn’t fathom how a pack of that size could approach without a sound.

They didn’t come any closer, just milled about sixty paces away. They must have known that he was watching, but they acted unconcerned. Except for one. The big grey beast he had first encountered in more familiar woods, he was suddenly sure. It caught his eyes, and held his gaze for an unsteadying minute, before shaking itself out and turning away.

“Gendry!” Arya’s voice called out and he turned, she and Sansa were on their feet now, packs on their backs, prepared for their short hike. He exhaled deeply and caught up with them.

“The wolves are back,” he told them, falling in step with Sansa as Arya led the way.

“That’s good,” Arya said, and she did seem bolstered by their presence.

They were silent for the rest of the walk, stalking, like the wolves. He spent the time thinking about Jimmie; the purpose gave him courage. 

The hollering and crackle of a large bonfire alerted them to the camp’s presence. If they stationed a lookout he was on the other side of the glade, closer to the road. The shadow of dusk disguised their approach. There was no one but the wolves to see them.

Gendry crept low, hiding himself behind trees and forsythia that was just starting to bud. There were two large fires set up in the clearing, opposite of where the horses were tied, set off a short distance from a singular tent, where the Lady must have been occupying herself. He didn’t let himself linger on the thought of her, instead looking at how the fires illuminated the faces of those sitting on the far sides of the fires, those closest, with their backs to him, were even harder to make out. He looked to the shadows instead, looking for a figure much shorter than the rest growing more frustrated each time a tuff of brown hair caught his eyes but didn’t belong to Jimmie.

He saw Jack though, sitting by the fire, legs casually spread. Not an air of responsibility about him. But it was his gesturing hands that inadvertently pointed him in the direction to the place Jimmie lay, curled tight around himself as he slept.

It wasn’t a spot that Gendry would be able to sneak to subtly, smack dab between the two fires. He took a deep breath and stepped into the glade, willing nonchalance into the set of his shoulders, familiarity into each step he took. He kept his face clear of the fires’ light, willing himself to just be another man amongst them.

Bedrolls were already spread out around Jimmie, even if no one else was using them yet. He was slow as he approached, even if every part of him wanted to rush, he was just a man, tired from the day, going to bed. He brushed off one of the blankets next to Jimmie, as if he were to make his bed in it. That was his mistake.

“Goin’ to sleep already you ninny!” Guffawed a man behind him, laughs accompanying the comment. “You a lad yourself?”

He couldn’t respond, surely the unfamiliar tone of his voice would paint him a stranger. Arya and Sansa must have seen him, he held his breath and waited for them to intervene.

“Wait, what’re you doin’ here?”

Fuck.

Jack was on his feet, looking straight at him, a confused twist to his mouth. Not a single plausible lie came to mind. Gendry licked his lips and stood up too, still making sure not to face the fire fully.

“Well? Come on now, I know you’re that bloke from the inn.”

His mouth was a trap for all the good it would do him. Their interaction hadn’t yet gotten the attention of the entire company but every second it got quieter. Eyes were digging into him like pins.

A snarl interrupted whatever nonsense his mouth was about to spew.

Wolves surrounded the camp at every turn, no longer quiet. They looked black in the shadows of the trees, their eyes catching the last licks of firelight and glowing orange. Their heckles were raised, ready to pounce. The stuff of nightmares.

And on the side of the clearing closest to the tent, Sansa and Arya walked out from the trees, the huge alpha between them.

The horses spooked, their hooves tramping the ground and brays of concern banishing any notion of a calm night. The disturbance flung the men into uncertain action. Some threw more kindling on the fires, others drew swords and waved them about, each swing threatening to decapitate a friend in the frenzy, most just yelled.

Jimmie awoke with a whimper, his arms instinctively curling around his head as he fought to breathe evenly.

“Hey, Jimmie, Jimmie,” Gendry said, trying to give all his attention to the boy in front of him even as he kept himself alert to avoid an errant kick and listen to the announcement Sansa was about to make. “It’s me, it’s Gendry. I’m gonna take care of you, okay, and we’re gonna get out of here.”

Tears were already making their way down Jimmie’s face by the time the boy had the wherewithal to drop his hands and look up at him. Yet the moment Gendry offered a reassuring smile he cried all the harder.

He wept through an apology, the words indistinct and unimportant as Gendry brought him to his feet, one arm over his shoulders as he tucked him close to his body.

“You’re okay,” he kept repeating, trying to find a way out of the crowd. But the chaos of moving bodies and fickleness of firelight only created confusion. He was on the verge of picking Jimmie up and barreling his way through when a single word was whispered through the glade, both sharp and silent, like paper violently shredded.

_“Stop.”_

Even the horses ceased their movement. For a held moment the only sounds in all the forest were the uneven gasp of a woman with a slit throat, and tracking paws landing on the cold earth, for wolves bowed to no man.

Then, testing and brave, Sansa said, “Mother.”

She was tall and grey. Her hair, her shawl, her skin. A ghost made corporeal. 

Gendry couldn’t even make out her face and he shivered. Jimmie pressed his face into his side, but Gendry didn’t let himself look away.

“Mother we came to see you.”

“We missed you,” Arya added, her voice struck through with emotion, the mixture of truth and lie twisted to the point of anguish on her face.

The wraith said nothing, and Sansa was crying when she spoke again.

“It’s us. It’s your daughters. Sansa and Arya.”

The lady exhaled, a sound like a fire being smothered.

“Remember us. Please.”

The sisters were holding hands, as if to keep one another standing. The wolf slipped out from between them, circling the three women. Preventing both an approach and an escape. Each stalking step seeming more final than the last.

Finally another deafening whisper.

_“Dead.”_

“No, we’re not dead,” Arya said, calmer than before. Resigned, he realized. Her face was cool next to Sansa’s own, which was flushed with heartbreak. One would think her composed and uncaring if not for the tautness running up her arm form where she held on to her sister. “You are.”

The Lady bristled; the edge of confrontation not lost on her. Sansa was quick to intervene.

“We want you back. Our family together again. We can do that if you stop all this brigading.”

“Gendry,” Jimmie whispers against him, as if in warning. But he quiets him with a hum, afraid of the tension breaking, of the men or wolves reacting. Everything was so still Gendry could almost taste the friction in the air.

“Let these men move on,” Sansa continued, “It’s spring now, there’s no need for this anymore. Come home.”

Gendry thought of Arya on the day they found the hanging men, how every part of her had quivered with regret. He looked for it in the Lady. But dead things didn’t have consciences. They didn’t learn, or grow, or regret. All they could do was rot.

He knew before the Lady’s final word.

 _Look at me_ , he thought, his eyes only for Arya. A mantra he couldn’t say aloud, but one that he willed through his mind and every part of his body. _Look at me. Look at me. Look at me._

 _“Kill,”_ said the Lady.

Arya looked to him.

And the wolf snapped its jaws.

There was no blood. No scream, no dying moan. Just dust, like charred wood crumbling with the slightest touch.

No one spoke a word.

Except for a wolf, one still in the trees, who howled, clear and deep. The others took up the call, in mourning or celebration or to simply hear an answer, Gendry didn’t know.

Sansa fell to the ground, as if she had been pushed, turning away from her sister’s touch and silent convulsions wracking through her.

He picked up Jimmie, the boy clinging to his back without word or complaint, heavy in his arms.

The men around them were muttering around him, confused and uncertain, but Gendry didn’t care for them. His eyes were stuck on Arya and Sansa and the limp cloak in front of them.

It was properly night now, deep and blue. But for the first time that day he wasn’t tired. Concern overpowered his exhaustion. That didn’t mean there still weren’t tests to his patience.

“Hey,” Jack said, calling out to him. “What was that? What are we supposed to do with ourselves now?”

Gendry almost snapped. All these spineless men without an independent thought in their heads, their days determined for them. He wanted to shame them, ask why they had surrendered their freedom to a vengeful spirit, ask what they had gained from it all. He nearly urged them to do whatever they wanted, that it mattered not to him. He swallowed those careless words.

“Do good,” he said, and pushed past the man.

Sansa wasn’t sobbing anymore, but she still wasn’t looking at Arya, who had sat down beside her, looking down at her hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said to them both, for there was nothing else to say.

“Thank you,” Arya said, though he didn’t know for what. Just being there, maybe.

“I should be the one thanking you.” He shifted his grip on Jimmie, who might have fallen asleep. If he was awake, he was terribly quiet. He’d have to tell Jeyne not to yell when they got back to the inn, he’d already learned a hard lesson.

“I’m glad you’re here.” Arya smiled, and though it was forced, it was sincere. The firelight on her face made the water in her eyes all the more fluid. They needed to leave this place.

“Do you want to come back with me?” He wanted to offer her his hand, but they were both supporting Jimmie’s legs. She stood up on her own.

“Yeah, I do.” She was tired, her body and her mind. And he couldn’t even imagine what sort of turmoil her heart was going through, but there was summer to recover, and Gendry would be there to hold her. She turned to her sister who sat rigid, with wet eyes. “Sansa, please say you’ll come with us?”

It was a long minute of quiet waiting, delicate. When she looked up there was understanding, and her hands stopped shaking. “Yes,” whispered Sansa, letting her sister take her arm.

They left the glade, the wolves’ eyes on their backs. Crocuses sprouted on the edge of the forest, Gendry was careful not to leave them crushed in his wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some extra headcanons for you perusal:
> 
> \- Jimmie becomes Gendry's apprentice when he gets the forge up and running and literally everyone wonders why they hadn't thought of that before.  
> \- Sansa becomes a weaver/seamstress in a nearby town and lives her Best Life  
> \- Gendry adds that second floor to the forge at some point for he and Arya to live together, and he gets roasted constantly for this shitty carpentry.  
> \- The orphans grow up and move out but there's always room for them at the table :') 
> 
> Anyway this fic was a lot of fun and I got veryyy carried away from my 6k outline, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

**Author's Note:**

> this was my attempt at making something darker and atmospheric but it turned into like…shoveling as foreplay and Gendry trying to be a heartless jock while simultaneously being completely unable to do that. can’t say im mad about it really but tell me what you think and I'll get the second chapter out soon!


End file.
